"Battle in the Clouds"

The Belmont Club plumbs the deeper meaning of the the Kerry/SBVT press coverage.

The undercard in the Kerry vs Swiftvets bout is Mainstream Media vs Kid Internet, two distinctly different fights, but both over information. The first is really the struggle over the way Vietnam will be remembered by posterity; whether its amanuensis will be John Kerry for the antiwar movement or those who felt betrayed by them. The victor in that struggle will get to inscribe the authoritative account of that mythical conflict in Southeast Asia: not in its events, but in its meaning. The fight will be as bitter as men for whom only memory remains can be bitter. But the undercard holds a fascination of its own. The reigning champion, the Mainstream Media, has been forced against all odds to accept the challenge of an upstart over the coverage of the Swiftvets controversy.

He also gets to the heart of the problem of conventional journalism:

It is not just raw information or pixels pushed onto a screen, but a system of semantic entities: an series of information objects, containing properties and methods containing embedded logic, set loose on society. The power of the Mainstream Media lay in the fact that they controlled the generation of news objects; how they arose, what they did, how they ran their course. They were the news object foundry; able to make them "type safe"; define what they could do, and what they could not. And that power was enormous.

I wrote this a year ago, but i think it has some relevance to the full-throated defense of John Kerry we see from the MSM

What is not often discussed is how professional ambitions make journalists defeatists. When wars go well, the uniformed military receives the praise. It is they who enter into history. We remember Nimitz and Patton, not the correspondents who wrote dispatches about the victories at Midway and Bastogne.

In contrast, Vietnam made the careers of David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, and Neil Sheehan. Exposing military failure and atrocities makes the journalist the hero not the chronicler. It is a powerful temptation, one which could cause a reporter to lose proportion and distort the meaning of events. Yet this is not something that seems to get discussed much.

If this is true, the press faces a serious problem: while defeatism is an occupational hazard, they must maintain credibility with the public in order to have prestige as well as attention. (Nobody wants to be like the Star or Enquirer.) That is why John Kerry-- the anti-war war hero-- was a godsend to Vietnam-era journalists. By confirming all the horror stories he validated the accuracy of the basic MSM account of Vietnam. He was made to order for Halberstam, Hersh, et.al.

Today's journalistic establishment is not so much committed to Kerry as they are to the myth of the heroic Vietnam truth-telling journalists. Vietnam and Watergate are the great myths of the guild. By revisiting Vietnam the SBVT are raising questions the guild views as closed. To wit: the war was unwinnable and unworthy of being won, brave reporters exposed government duplicity, the people saw that they had been lied to and turned back to the path of righteousness.

There are other ways to frame the war, however. That the war was difficult but worthy, that the soldiers and officers were neither pitiful victims nor war criminals, that the key battleground was US public opinion not the Central Highlands, that the press was the unwitting abettor of the enemy in that battle. Not surprising, the press does not like this narrative much at all and prefers to treat it as taboo.