Viewers beware: Ben Rhodes in the media house
This past week, former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes was in the news for three reasons.
A clip from HBO documentary The Final Year made the rounds. It depicted Rhodes on election night, sitting in silent despondency after Trump's landslide victory over Hillary was officially announced. (Any possibility that a Rhodes-enabled 'Obama Legacy' would endure was in the same moment crushed.)
He had published a recollection of his Obama Administration time: The World As It Is.
And NBC and MSNBC announced they had hired the devastated politico and would-be author as a contributor. (This portrays the unhealthy nexus between electoral and journalistic worlds. So does the fact that CBS News is run by David Rhodes, brother of the one-time Obama Minister of Propaganda.)
The clip was funny, at least for the tens of millions of us who'd put our shoulders to the Trump campaign. Our victory was America's victory.
And indeed, as yesterday's bad-for-America pacts and international fumblings are hurled into the shredder, it is increasingly as if the wretched Obama presidency had never been perpetrated on us.
So, it was satisfying to see Rhodes, who had done so much to disserve America, inches from weeping as the bell tolled.
But his employ by NBC and MSNBC is serious.
To understand Ben Rhodes' eagerness to manipulate information citizens get from officials, that an ideological agenda might be advanced, and his willingness to exploit reporters as an "echo chamber" for his artfully contrived bannering, consider the praise of one of his allies.
"The aspiring novelist who became Obama's foreign policy guru," was a May 5, 2016 New York Times Magazine article written by David Samuels.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html?_r=0
"Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer's tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal," wrote Samuels. "He is adept at creating overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations, and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials."
That's a fine description of someone who intends rigid narrative command. It does not capture a commentator open to healthy intellectual exchanges and willing to consider alternative perspectives, that truths might be established and solutions discovered.
"He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives...His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility -- like military or diplomatic service, or even a master's degree in international relations rather than creative writing -- is still startling."
That NBC and MSNBC would inflict a yarn-spinning professional policy huckster as commentator illustrates that those channels view their enterprises as pushing partisan ambitions, not promoting honest dialogue.
When a televised opinion panel consists of three aggressive liberals and one tepid conservative -- and with the host often joining the battle from the liberals' quarter -- balance is but a fiction and viewers are shunted down a partisan path.
Of course, most television news commentators hail from ideologically distinct zip codes. And when they are granted equal liberty in open combat, viewers are well served. The truth can emerge.
But NBC and MSNBC are not in the habit of fairness. That they are not alone among news channels in rigging debate does not minimize their culpability.
Rhodes is not the only Obama Administration alumnus to turn up on television news. CBS has John Brennan. James Clapper speaks on CNN. Susan Rice is a Netflix board member. And Barack and Michelle themselves recently signed with Netflix as producers.
The Newly Press observed "it's clear" that former officials of the dumped team desire to control news and entertainment information upon which the average American bases his understanding of the world, opinions of events and figures, and voting inclinations.
Consider yourselves warned. When Rhodes appears on screen, reach for a big grain of salt.
----------
A clip from HBO documentary The Final Year made the rounds. It depicted Rhodes on election night, sitting in silent despondency after Trump's landslide victory over Hillary was officially announced. (Any possibility that a Rhodes-enabled 'Obama Legacy' would endure was in the same moment crushed.)
He had published a recollection of his Obama Administration time: The World As It Is.
And NBC and MSNBC announced they had hired the devastated politico and would-be author as a contributor. (This portrays the unhealthy nexus between electoral and journalistic worlds. So does the fact that CBS News is run by David Rhodes, brother of the one-time Obama Minister of Propaganda.)
The clip was funny, at least for the tens of millions of us who'd put our shoulders to the Trump campaign. Our victory was America's victory.
And indeed, as yesterday's bad-for-America pacts and international fumblings are hurled into the shredder, it is increasingly as if the wretched Obama presidency had never been perpetrated on us.
So, it was satisfying to see Rhodes, who had done so much to disserve America, inches from weeping as the bell tolled.
But his employ by NBC and MSNBC is serious.
To understand Ben Rhodes' eagerness to manipulate information citizens get from officials, that an ideological agenda might be advanced, and his willingness to exploit reporters as an "echo chamber" for his artfully contrived bannering, consider the praise of one of his allies.
"The aspiring novelist who became Obama's foreign policy guru," was a May 5, 2016 New York Times Magazine article written by David Samuels.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html?_r=0
"Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer's tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal," wrote Samuels. "He is adept at creating overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations, and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials."
That's a fine description of someone who intends rigid narrative command. It does not capture a commentator open to healthy intellectual exchanges and willing to consider alternative perspectives, that truths might be established and solutions discovered.
"He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives...His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility -- like military or diplomatic service, or even a master's degree in international relations rather than creative writing -- is still startling."
That NBC and MSNBC would inflict a yarn-spinning professional policy huckster as commentator illustrates that those channels view their enterprises as pushing partisan ambitions, not promoting honest dialogue.
When a televised opinion panel consists of three aggressive liberals and one tepid conservative -- and with the host often joining the battle from the liberals' quarter -- balance is but a fiction and viewers are shunted down a partisan path.
Of course, most television news commentators hail from ideologically distinct zip codes. And when they are granted equal liberty in open combat, viewers are well served. The truth can emerge.
But NBC and MSNBC are not in the habit of fairness. That they are not alone among news channels in rigging debate does not minimize their culpability.
Rhodes is not the only Obama Administration alumnus to turn up on television news. CBS has John Brennan. James Clapper speaks on CNN. Susan Rice is a Netflix board member. And Barack and Michelle themselves recently signed with Netflix as producers.
The Newly Press observed "it's clear" that former officials of the dumped team desire to control news and entertainment information upon which the average American bases his understanding of the world, opinions of events and figures, and voting inclinations.
Consider yourselves warned. When Rhodes appears on screen, reach for a big grain of salt.
----------
posted by DC Larson at
June 04, 2018
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