Massimo Watch 08.02.10: Living In A Vacuum

[Update: I originally thought the article referenced here was by Massimo Pigliucci; it was not. The article was posted by Massimo, but was written by Michael De Dora. I have made the appropriate corrections below].

De Dora on media objectivity:

”FOX News has been worse than other news organizations at objectivity in any sense of the word. But FOX News hasn’t made people right wing in their beliefs; they haven’t created their audience from scratch. FOX News might further the reach of the Tea Party or of the Right, but even that depends on some core group of FOX News viewers wanting to hear about the Tea Party and Right ideology. Again, this does not excuse FOX News portraying the Tea Party’s stance as correct and worth supporting (they have gone out of their way to do so, which is despicable for a “news” outlet). But it does mean the Tea Party and the Right exist for reasons outside of FOX News."
[emphasis added].

It is despicable, according to De Dora, to publish news that the Leftist JournOlisters won't. It is as simple as that. An embargo set by the JournOlist should be obeyed. Shining light on it is despicable. This is really all one needs to know about the intellectual ethics of the Left. But there is more.

"Even if Breitbart and others “create” the news – Shirley Sherrod is a racist! Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.! – people need to buy into it for it to work.”

This is a blatant lie. Obama’s boys declared Sherrod a racist, not Breitbart; Breitbart went after, and nailed, the NAACP, who were reacting to their perception of Sherrod's statements. So this is false, demonstrably so.

“Even in the case of the Birthers, who deny Obama’s presidential legitimacy based on the unsubstantiated idea that he wasn’t born in the U.S., there needs to be a crowd of people who want to doubt information about Obama’s birth for the media to cover it seriously. As Gary Younge once succinctly put it, the media cannot sell Spam as steak; someone actually needs to think, or be highly open to the idea, that Spam is steak to begin with.”
[emphasis added].

Unsubstantiated idea indeed! What is unsubstantiated is Obama’s birth location, as De Dora admits in his vaporous adjective. Why won’t Obama release the actual birth certificate? Or his college records? Or any records at all? Why doesn't the public intellectual care?

”By blaming social problems on one man or one organization, we thus ignore the social reality that these men and organizations are backed by millions of Americans, and make the problem out to be much simpler than it really is. They would not exist in such powerful roles without the support of a sizable number of people. This is apparently hard to accept for some on the political Left. Consider, for instance, that despite the fact that poll after poll has shown that up to half of Americans believe the world is 6,000 years old, few people I discuss such polls with believe me, dismissing the idea that so many Americans believe such a crazy thing. One can only hope that people soon overcome this inability to accept reality , for the well-being of our country, indeed our world, may depend on it.”

Young earth creationism is, in fact, not realistic. But it is a Black and White Fallacy and Category Error to use that benign belief to “prove” a separate issue. The issue that the De Dora Left hates is that the majority of Americans wish to take care of themselves and for the Left to butt out of their lives. But the De Dora Left knows that this is a problem they must solve; that the attitude of self-independence is just not realistic; it is a roadblock to be overcome.

” With Sherrod now vindicated, and Breitbart and FOX News looking extraordinarily bad, some are arguing that the media and others should ignore these two going forward (though one could easily argue that their true colors had been revealed long ago). But even so, they represent a sizable social contingent, and for that reason alone it seems we ought to pay some attention. Humans are not naturally skeptics, and even reasonable people will get sucked into believing lies and half-truths.”

De Dora needs to keep up. According to him, the public intellectual, such intellectuals should reveal untruths. But De Dora doesn’t have all the facts about the Sherrod case, including the reason that Breitbart posted the clip in the first place, which was not to display Sherrod’s racism, but to highlight the racism of the NAACP. Sherrod was fired, rehired, lionized, and then turned racially hostile… again and in public view. Maybe De Dora even knows all this, and ignores it, just as he ignores JournOlist-gate, the “other Obama campaign”: far more media members in a blatant collusion toward Leftist, Democrat objectives, and smears of the “Other”.

As a public intellectual, self-endowed, De Dora follows a Leftist agenda, and does so religiously. He is either unaware of his logical and factual errors, or he just doesn’t care about that, because the agenda is more important. This would place De Dora into the Consequentialist camp, ethically speaking.

The idea that the masses are arousing themselves to shrug off the humanist programs of the Left leaves De Dora truly distraught, to the point that he openly displays his elitist prejudices and gallops straight into false information mongering and logical fallacies without looking back. The public intellectual Left knows...knows... what the Other needs, far better than the Other possibly could. That's because the Other are not public intellectuals.