Memo for Oliver Willis

Posted on | August 13, 2012 | 19 Comments

Your make the intriguing assertion that it’s bad form for the press corps to tell the version of events favored by the campaign:

So it appears that the Romney campaign briefed multiple news outlets about the behind the scenes of how they hid Paul Ryan’s selection from the media. I’m not saying this isn’t a story, but the way this is being rolled out is pretty ridiculous.
All of these news outlets and several of their writers began tweeting out links to the story at midnight, which would indicate they were all under some kind of embargo. But they’re all basically telling the same story!
I feel like these guys all decided to embrace their inner Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum while writing this fanfic.
It’s also worth noting that with very few variations, this is the version of the story of how Romney selected Ryan that the campaign wants to be told.

Really? For the past four years (longer than that, actually, going back to fall 2007, during the Democratic primary campaign against Hillary) the press corps has rather shamelessly covered Obama in exactly the way David Axelrod wants Obama covered. Bernie Goldberg wrote a book about it entitled A Slobbering Love Affair.

However, let a Republican campaign manage to control their own narrative — no matter how minor the subject — and you cry foul.

What you are clearly advocating is that the press must be relentlessly adversarial toward Republicans, even while your and your buddies at Media Matters denounce any news organization that takes an adversarial approach toward its reporting on Democrats. You are, in effect, expecting the media to operate according to Herbert Marcuse’s Marxist-Leninist redefinition of tolerance:

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”

And the insulting thing about it is that you act as if the rest of us are too stupid to see what you’re doing. It is not my intention here to write an entire treatise on the causes and effects, the history and culture of liberal media bias. Frankly, I just don’t have time today. But your indignation at the coverage of the Ryan roll-out calls to mind something John Podhoretz observed:

So insulated are many, if not most, American liberals that they simply presume that which they despise is inherently despicable, and that what they fear is inherently fearful. As they gather in their echo chamber, all they hear are voices resounding with the monstrousness of redesigning Medicare and the parlousness of cutting the federal budget. They genuinely do not know that budget cutting is popular, even if only in theory, and that tens of millions of voters do understand the notion that the government is living far beyond its means.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll.) This “insulation” of which Podhoretz speaks is made possible by the dominance of liberalism not only in the news media, but also in the entertainment industry and in the educational establishment. It takes a real effort for anyone to see over the hedges of liberal belief that have been erected around us, and to understand that the world we behold on TV — in magazines, in movies, in history textbooks — is a warped funhouse-mirror reflection of the actual world.

The people who perpetuate these distortions of reality are enthralled by what Thomas Sowell called The Vision of the Anointed.

They believe themselves to be engaged in a worthy cause, the advancement of capital-p Progress, and they regard those who oppose them as unlightened or even malevolent.

Therefore, the anointed attempt to suppress knowledge of facts that don’t confirm their vision, and insist that we pay attention only to the narrative that they have carefully constructed. This is why Media Matters rails so persistently and obsessively about Fox News, and this is why liberals high-fived each other when Andrew Breitbart died, because the political success of liberalism is dependent on monopolistic control of the narrative.

You think we’re too stupid to see what you’re doing, and you demonize anyone who accurately describes what you’re doing, lest anyone pay attention to the little boy who points out that the Emperor has no clothes.

As to this specific occasion — major news organizations all telling the same story of the Ryan roll-out — is it not possible that the reason they’re all telling the same story is because the story is true? Must you rule out as self-evidently implausible the version of events told by the Romney campaign? Must members of the media presume that whatever Republicans say is false? Are Republicans so notoriously dishonest that even in so minor a matter as this, they must be lying, so that reporters must apply their investigative skills to learn the hidden (and presumably scandalous) Real Truth behind the lies?

What you seem to be asserting, Oliver Willis, is either:

A. Everything that Republicans say is false.

B. There is no such thing as objective truth, only whatever “truth” serves a particular political purpose.

We are not too stupid to see the implicit logic of your arguments, nor are we too stupid to understand why the Democrat-Media Complex is panicked by the Neutral Objective Fact that Paul Ryan is sexy.

Category: Media Bias

Comments

19 Responses to “Memo for Oliver Willis”

jlwellfonder
August 13th, 2012 @ 12:09 pm

Buahahahaha…………last sentence…………priceless!
Quartermaster
August 13th, 2012 @ 12:20 pm

I’m hoping the libtards are scared of their own shadows by the time this is over.
Memo for Oliver Willis « Jackie Wellfonder – Raging Against the Rhetoric
August 13th, 2012 @ 12:21 pm

[…] just gotta read the full article at The Other McCain….the last sentence is priceless. Share […]
JeffS
August 13th, 2012 @ 12:22 pm

Willis is more like the “Anti-Kryptonite To Stupid”.
Finrod Felagund
August 13th, 2012 @ 12:23 pm

Whatta maroon.
Steve in TN
August 13th, 2012 @ 12:42 pm

He’s a Redskins fan, so he ain’t all bad.
Losing Control of the Narrative | hogewash
August 13th, 2012 @ 12:57 pm

[…] Read the whole thing. Share this:TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmailPrintLike this:LikeBe the first to like this. This entry was posted in Blogging, Election 2012, Main Stream Media, Political Correctness and tagged Oliver Willis by wjjhoge. Bookmark the permalink. […]
Wombat_socho
August 13th, 2012 @ 1:12 pm

Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, but apparently O-Dub hasn’t gotten the message.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
August 13th, 2012 @ 1:24 pm

I am still glad Ali and RSM got on their horses and rode to Concord yelling: “Pawlenty is coming, Pawlenty is coming!”
robertstacymccain
August 13th, 2012 @ 1:34 pm

No, he’s just plain stupid.
Bob Belvedere
August 13th, 2012 @ 1:41 pm

Damn well put.
AnonymousDrivel
August 13th, 2012 @ 1:55 pm

You lost me at “Oliver Willis”.
Randy_Rager
August 13th, 2012 @ 3:44 pm

Oliver Willis isn’t quite the dumbest little attention whore alive, but he’s close enough that hardly anyone on the Right will link him any more.
Adjoran
August 13th, 2012 @ 3:55 pm

I didn’t even know that lying little punk was still around.

The leftist memes are patterned after Stalin’s propaganda machine, which so impress Goebbels that he copied it for his boss. Basically, they all say the same thing, no matter how outrageously untrue, and repeat it over and over. Where it is forbidden to dissent, the lie is eventually believed.

Unfortunately for today’s Democrats, the internet has ended the great media chorus for their meme o’ the day, alternative voices can make themselves heard – and once people realize there are others who think like them, they become stronger.

The days of the professional agitprop specialist are coming to a close. Fortunately for Oliver Willis, Soros will always have trash that needs to be taken out, and perhaps a dog to walk.
Who watches the apparatchiks? « The Rhetorican
August 13th, 2012 @ 4:57 pm

[…] watches the apparatchiks?Who watches the apparatchiks? Oliver Willis, for one. Share this:FacebookTwitterLinkedIn […]
Saul
August 13th, 2012 @ 6:23 pm

Willis hasn’t picked up on what happened, even though it’s explained in one of the news stories he links to. At the end of the day on Saturday, in a hangar at Dulles, Romney aide Beth Myers gave a briefing to all the travelling press, laying out the story of how and when Ryan was chosen. Everybody who was there (just 17 miles from Manassas!) heard the same story, which is why everybody wrote essentially the same story.
But why are you criticizing Willis for criticizing the reporters who parroted a story that you say is false? If Myer’s account of the Ryan-selection timeline is a lie, as you have insisted it is, then shouldn’t the press gaggle be slammed for mindlessly disseminating it?Willis actually has a good point: this was typical lap-dog reporting by the pod of traveling idiots. They write what the campaign tells them to write, and hold it until the campaign tells them they can publish it…or they get kicked off the plane. It’s a stupid way to cover a campaign, because the whole point of taking a pod of idiots on the campaign plane is that it gives the campaign control over them, and allows the campaign to spoon-feed what it wants and withhold what it wants. This isn’t a partisan issue, even though Willis is just as much a partisan as you are, Stacy. Reporters go along with it no matter which party does it.
JeffS
August 13th, 2012 @ 7:44 pm

What about Sandra Fluke, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and David Brooks?
JeffS
August 13th, 2012 @ 7:45 pm

OK, then…..”Anti-Kryptonite OF Stupid”.
Ricardo
August 14th, 2012 @ 4:32 pm

Oliver Willis is Fat Albert’s evil twin.