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The Mighty Wurlitzer
AngelHedgie
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
You've probably heard of it. It's also been called by many other names, such as the Right Wing Echo Chamber. But for pure image evocation, I've always gone with The Mighty Wurlitzer. And it is this one tool that has probably contributed to the rightward shift we've seen in American discourse.
So, a good place to start is explaining what the Mighty Wurlitzer (MW for short) is. Put simply, the MW is an interlocking system of right wing organizations, press outlets, pundits, funders, and such that have created a sealed media system. A meme can be injected into the MW, much like you would put a record into an old fashioned calliope, and the system of interlinked components magnifies and refines it, until it becomes a steady stream of talking points and reports all furthering an underlying idea. More importantly, the system protects the interlocking parts from external forces - the system is very effective at isolating and containing criticism. The end result is that a person who tunes into the MW will get a feed of information cued just as how those operating it want it, with no interruptions.
The Mighty Wurlitzer is a fearsome thing, indeed.
So, a good place to start is explaining what the Mighty Wurlitzer (MW for short) is. Put simply, the MW is an interlocking system of right wing organizations, press outlets, pundits, funders, and such that have created a sealed media system. A meme can be injected into the MW, much like you would put a record into an old fashioned calliope, and the system of interlinked components magnifies and refines it, until it becomes a steady stream of talking points and reports all furthering an underlying idea. More importantly, the system protects the interlocking parts from external forces - the system is very effective at isolating and containing criticism. The end result is that a person who tunes into the MW will get a feed of information cued just as how those operating it want it, with no interruptions.
The Mighty Wurlitzer is a fearsome thing, indeed.
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I forget what they call it, but in D.C. every Wednesday they actually hold a meeting for prominent conservatives in the media, to further exactly this purpose.
What's funny is that a lot of people will dismiss this as a conspiracy theory, but the fact is that it's almost all done right out in the open, but, for obvious reasons, almost never reported on.
I don't know really what else to add execpt
What groups are in this mighty machine?
Mediawise, you've got the usual suspects - Fox News, the Daily News (and News Corp overall, to a small extent), the Washington Times, Clear Channel.
Expertwise, you've got the think tanks - AEI, Cato, Heritage, Manhattan Institute, etc.
There are also the pundits, who I don't think I really need to name.
One weakness that the system has is that it's not tuned to participation, which is actually a byproduct of the whole "ignoring criticism" feature. The result is that the online communities around it aren't all that strong - I don't think that RedState, Free Republic, or LGF has nearly the clout of DU or DailyKos.
Yeah. People would think this a conspiracy, but conspiracies try to, you know, HIDE their existence. The MW is pretty much out in the open. What makes it so dangerous is that a person can easily become surrounded by it - only able to hear what it says. The result of that are such things as the study that showed that Fox News viewers were the most likely to believe in a link between Sadaam and 9/11.
I thought this was about organs. But it's about politics.
Well, what's most disturbing is that there is no real underlying conspiracy - no shadowy cabal. It's just a bunch of interlocking components that when meshed together create something much larger. For an example, you'll have a pundit who, while regurgitating a meme that's been processed, refers to a story from, say, the National Review. In turn, that story calls on experts from think tanks like AEI and Cato. The result is an argument that looks well researched - but if you look, at no time did that research leave the scope of the MW. In such a system, it becomes real easy to redefine reality to your liking.
So what you are saying is that there are a group of people who tend to agree with each other, and they share information with each other, publish it in the open, and...what? Try to advance their position?
This deserves its own name and is feared because....?
Because the information and research that they relay and conduct is never subjected to peer review by an outside source before it's sold as truth?
Not to mention that each layer reinforces the others - there's a reason one of the other names is the Right Wing Echo Chamber.
It just seems to be a mountain from a molehill. It's politics, and I would expect the left has similar setups. I just don't know that anyone has gone to the point of naming them or even exploring them as a problem. If they memes are wrong, they can be proven so. It wouldn't be the first time something wrong or stupid was repeated en masse by an ideological group, but if it's in the open, then I fail to see the concern.
Mind you, I'm not arguing that it's not there, because to be honest, I don't know. It just seems logical to me that if someone generates an ideological idea, it will be repeated by those who agree.
The right-wing echo chamber is practically a fourth branch of government, and it manages to cause many, many lies to become taken by many Americans as gospel truth. You can say "well, why don't people just refute it?" but that doesn't work when they've convinced 30% of America that any source that doesn't agree with them is part of the Liberal Media.
From what you are saying, I can see how the right-wing version is a bit more organized than whatever is on the left.
If that's the case then share away guys. Spread the word.
Interesting to say the least. My only concern is that these are just three of the misperceptions. They are all misperceptions, but I wonder if they have more to do with the network's beliefs that reporting certain things are more important than others.
For instance, is there on whether people felt that "Bush lied" about the intelligence, rather than "the intelligence was wrong". Or "Halliburton received contracts because of Cheney" vs. "Halliburton had the same contracts under the Clinton administration for Bosnia and Kosovo".
Say what you will about the Bush administration, but I can't really think of anything that most people in the mainstream believe about them that is both negative and demonstrably false.
Okay, for a good example, let's take John Lott. Lott is a disgraced hack of a scholar - it has been pretty thoroughly proven that his data used to support More Guns, Less Crime was well and truly cooked, to say nothing of his adventures on Amazon.com in cyberdrag (Google "Mary Rosh" for more on that bizzare incident.) The scandal over all this cost him tenure in the academic world.
Yet, Lott is still in the media as an expert, and you'll still see conservatives and libertarians cite More Guns, Less Crime as an authoritative source (and boy do they get pissed when you laugh in their face.) How did this happen?
Simple - Lott was picked up by AEI, who hired him because he said what they wanted, and looks pretty persuasive on the surface. So when Fox News covers something like, say, the VT shooting, and they need an expert - they call up AEI, who is more than happy to send out Lott - and the newspeople at FNC know better than to really pry into Lott's credentials. More Guns, Less Crime is still printed by a right wing imprint. Pundits still cite his work. And while external critics will point out that he lies like an oriental rug, they're easily silenced. So in the end, because of how the interlocking parts work, provably false data is promugated as the truth, and the discredited source is paraded around as an expert.
I just looked him up. Freedomnomics? Is that the best title he could come up with?
You'll not find me defending John Lott for his Mary Rosh stunt. That's despicable. I haven't read his book, or followed the controversy around it, but most of what I've seen has been around his tendency to massage data to get his point across. Links I followed through liberal sites of factual issues didn't really pan out. I could be wrong, but the most complete analysis I found of the whole picture was on motherjones, which was quite thorough in showing that there are scholarly papers that show if you cut the data differently (such as the "remove florida and the data changes drastically" one) it tells a different story. That's a good criticism of his work, certainly. It's the same one I used when talking about the IPCC report: politically motivated, selected data, and designed to prove a point. Everything I see shows him guilty of that.
(please note: most of what I found was about the "lost" data for his 98% claim. This is a very valid criticism, and in and of itself would disqualify him from being respected. It looks like he repeated the study a few years later and republished all of his data in a different book. I could not find any references to false data in that study.)
So what I'm saying is, I don't know if Lott (as an example) is full of shit. I see that there's reason to doubt his work, and I respect your point that he's not challenged enough on it. Since your viewpoint likely skews against his (or conservatism in general), I'm sure you see these examples enough to cause you concern. I'm equally sure that I see stuff like that on the left side because of my viewpoints (like the IPCC). The difference is, I was vilified for saying I've seen reports on issues with the IPCC.
I would call accusations of lying to be more than just opinion, that's an accusation that can be tested. In fact, it's held by a large amount of liberals. I'm not saying some people aren't idiots, just that these misconceptions could be hand selected to provide the data needed to make the point that FNC = bad, NPR = good.
I mean, really, I knew there were no WMDs going into Iraq. Why didn't G.W.? He claims to have been misled, but really, I don't even have a security clearance, let alone his kind of access; how come I knew more than he did? Frankly, I don't think I did, and I think he lied about it. I don't think that's an unreasonable presumption to make. Do I have indisputable, hard evidence to back it up? No, but again, on the did he/didn't he scale, I definitely think a preponderance of the evidence points to "he did."
And yeah, I'd like to see a similar survey done with some more typically left-leaning misperceptions. I just honestly can't think of any.
That's probably coming from Lott's longstanding feud with Steven Levitt.
After this whole thing with Scooter Libby, I'm entirely willing to believe that the Bush administration is the fucking Sith.
I want an unbiased read of the companies involved with sources cited and proof of the meetings taking place.
This stuff is interesting.
XBL: QuazarX
Try this.
I guess most of these types of write-ups will be on liberal sites though, right? I guess it makes sense. Anyway, thanks, it's reading time!
EDIT: Good read. Once you get passed lines like:
"And he regrets that he was part of the right-wing jihad against Clinton that so poisoned American politics."
There's some good info there.
XBL: QuazarX
Oh, I see. You KNEW that there were no weapons there, despite having no security clearance, no evidence, no proof, no first-hand experience in Saddam's government, no diplomatic relations with Syrian officials, no access to classified files, but you knew.
Congress didn't know. The UN didn't know. The NSA didn't know. At best, they may have had doubts, but not reasonable enough to say the itelligence was wrong. But Thanatos knew. Tell you what, next Pres, D or R, I'm nominating you to be the sole arbiter of national security issues.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you highly suspected there were no WMDs. I did too. But I didn't know.
I did some more searching for misperceptions and opinions related to left-leaning ideas, but I don't think there's been a study. I think it's because the media is biased and doesn't want to investigate. ;-)
Wow.
Those of us who listened to NPR and watched BBC pre-war saw all sorts of reports--both first-hand accounts by journalists and interviews with intelligence, government, UN, and diplomatic officials--which created an overwhelmingly strong case against Bush.
You're right that no one "knew for sure" what the facts of the situation were at the time, but that's always the case. And when the supposedly "liberal" American media botch a long-term investigation into a war, while public and foreign media manage to (in retrospect) totally nail the story, then yes, those media start to look more objectively trustworthy.
And now we're back to the old topic of media bias. NPR and BBC being two of the ones most often associated with the claim of being liberal would then, in turn, run stories by and feature reporting by people who would portray a claim counter to those by a conservative administration. You know, scratch that, a Republican administration, not a conservative one.
The evidence presented was strong enough, at the time, to convince 77 senators (including 26 democrats), 296 representatives (including 81 democrats) and leaders of other foreign nations.
I'm not saying it was correct, but saying it was known to false, versus saying there were reservations or conflicting reports is a different thing. Maybe splitting hairs, even.
Wow. So being pretty much 100% correct in your reporting is now "liberal bias"?
Okay, I know that's not fair and that's not really what you're saying. But here's the deal: regardless of their liberal bias NPR, BBC, et al got the story 100% correct.
When conservatives and Republicans and whoever else disparage media outlets as "liberal," they're trying to discredit all of the results of their reporting, whether that bias would even have an effect on the story or not.
Bias is only worth noting as a "problem" when it affects your ability to report the news. NPR and BBC don't have this problem, Fox does. As for the others, it's up in the air.
DISCLAIMER: I don't accept that NPR and BBC are liberally biased, by the way.
I don't think anyone's mentioned it yet, but the documentary Outfoxed is well worth a watch.
What?!
Not once have I ever heard this claim squared against those two stations. The reality of the situation is that people complaining about media bias don't actually know what the center is. They think centrism is some fucked up middle point where everybody's confused about hating gays but things they want to let them marry. The American reality of centrism is progressivism, where people sincerely want the gays to get married, think religion has a nominal place in government at best, and enjoy their personal freedoms.
The average is not the center because a bunch of crazy right-winger fucktwatcuntpricks have thrown the balance off. The center is the median, and the median in America is progressivism.
Let me guess...you're a liberal. That means it's unlikely you would hear this claim. Which is exactly what I said in my post, it's a CLAIM.
Also, though support for gay-marriage is increasing, I wouldn't call it the center yet. Gay marriage bans run about 60/40 in support. My source, the National Gay and Lesbian Task force.