Pre-election media tid-bits

Here are some things for you.

If there is one radio show you should listen to every week it's This American Life.
This week: What's in a Number? 2006 Edition. The preview from www.thislife.org:

A new study in the British medical journal The Lancet estimates the number of Iraqi dead since the U.S. invasion at over 600,000. This week, we look at whether that number might be accurate, and return to a in-depth look at a similar study in The Lancet, with similar methodology. That study came out a year ago, and was largely ignored by the press. We also hear U.S. forces dealing with the aftermath of some of those Iraqi civilian deaths.

If there is one column you should read every week it's Frank Rich's column from the Sunday edition of the NY Times. An excerpt from this week's column Throw the Truthiness Bums Out. (subscription required):

The 2002 midterms were ridiculed as the "Seinfeld" election -- about nothing -- and 2006 often does seem like the "Colbert" election, so suffused is it with unreality, or what Mr. Colbert calls "truthiness." Or perhaps the "Borat" election, after the character created by Mr. Colbert's equally popular British counterpart, Sacha Baron Cohen, whose mockumentary about the American travels of a crude fictional TV reporter from Kazakhstan opened to great acclaim this weekend. Like both these comedians, our politicians and their media surrogates have been going to extremes this year to blur the difference between truth and truthiness, all the better to confuse the audience.

But there's one important difference. When Mr. Colbert's fake talking head provokes a real congressman into making a fool of himself or Mr. Baron Cohen's fake reporter tries to storm the real White House's gates, it's a merry prank for our entertainment. By contrast, the clowns on the ballot busily falsifying reality are vying to be in charge of our real world at one of the most perilous times in our history.

While lying politicians and hyperbolic negative TV campaign ads are American staples, the artificial realities created this year are on a scale worthy of Disney, if not Stalin. In the campaign's final stretch, Congress and President Bush passed with great fanfare a new law to erect a 700-mile border fence to keep out rampaging Mexican immigrants, but guaranteed no money to actually build it. Rush Limbaugh tried to persuade his devoted audience that Michael J. Fox had exaggerated his Parkinson's symptoms in an ad for candidates who support stem-cell research purely as an act.

In a class by itself is the president's down-to-the-wire effort to brand his party as the defender of "traditional" marriage even as the same-sex scandals of conservative leaders on and off Capitol Hill make "La Cage aux Folles" look like "The Sound of Music." Just in recent days, the Rev. Ted Haggard, a favored Bush spiritual adviser and visitor to the Oval Office (if not the Lincoln Bedroom), resigned as leader of the National Association of Evangelicals after accusations that he patronized a male prostitute, and the Talking Points Memo blog broke the story of the Republican Party taking money from a gay-porn distributor whose stars include active-duty soldiers. (A film version of Mrs. Cheney's "Sisters," alas, still awaits.)

And always, always there's the false reality imposed on Iraq: "Absolutely, we're winning!" in the president's recent formulation. After all this time, you'd think the Iraq fictions wouldn't work anymore. The overwhelming majority of Americans now know that we were conned into this mess in the first place by two fake story lines manufactured by the White House, a connection between 9/11 and Saddam and an imminent threat of nuclear Armageddon. Both were trotted out in our last midterm campaign to rush a feckless Congress into voting for a war authorization before Election Day. As the administration pulls the same ploy four years later, this time to keep the fiasco going, you have to wonder if it can get away with lying once more.

And Rich on the whole Kerry episode:

On the same day Mr. Kerry blundered, the United States suffered a palpable and major defeat in Iraq. The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, once again doing the bidding of the anti-American leader Moktada al-Sadr, somehow coerced American forces into dismantling their cordon of Sadr City, where they were searching for a kidnapped soldier. As the melodramatic debates over how much Mr. Kerry should apologize dragged on longer, still more real news got short shrift: the October death toll for Americans in Iraq was the highest in nearly two years. Some 90 percent of the dead were enlisted men and nearly a third were on extended tours of duty or their second or third tours. Their average age was 24.

When the premises for war were being sold four years ago, you could turn to the fake news of Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" to find the skepticism that might poke holes in the propaganda. Four years later, the press is much chastened by its failure to do its job back then, but not all of the press. While both Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert made sport of the media's overkill on the Kerry story, their counterparts in "real" television news, especially but not exclusively on cable, flogged it incessantly. Only after The New York Times uncovered a classified Pentagon chart documenting Iraq's rapid descent into chaos did reality begin to intrude on the contrived contretemps posed by another tone-deaf flub from a former presidential candidate not even on the ballot.

Will people wake up? I hope so. Here's what is at stake (from The Alliance for Justice).