If Andrew Sullivan Is the Future of Journalism Then Journalism Is Fucked - Islamophobia Hate Propaganda - Our Best and Our Brightest Are Our Worst and Dimmest

Source: The New Face of Journalism

IF ANDREW SULLIVAN IS THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM THEN JOURNALISM IS FUCKED

FROM: MARK AMES
TO: THE JOURNALISTIC ETHICS DESK
DATE: JAN 7TH, 2013

LAS VEGAS, NV: Andrew Sullivan [it should be realized Andrew Sullivan is a British citizen] is all over the news after announcing he’s going solo, parting ways with Tina Brown shortly after she put a pillow over Newsweek’s face.

But in all the media excitement over Sullivan’s decision to rely on the much-maligned subscription model for his revenues ("bold experiment!"... "A thrill!"... "a flag of hope for every writer!"... "a dramatic stand!"...) no one raised the most obvious question of all: Why would subscribers pay to support one of the most colossal serial-failures in American journalism of the past two decades?

Reports claim that Sullivan has already raised $400,000 from his readers. If Sullivan really has raised this much money, and if his subscription model genuinely succeeds thanks to tens of thousands of subscribers supporting his work, it means we’re witnessing something new and deeply disturbing: "mutualised" unaccountability (to use one of their idiotic neologisms); the democratization of rewarding media failure and fraud.

Sullivan is getting away with it and profiting from failure thanks to two key elements to his media business model: Blogger cronyism, providing a network of media suckups all too eager to offer free PR to Sullivan’s business in the hope that "Sully" will logroll back at them some day; and the American public’s amnesia.

I happen to know just how rotten Sullivan is because over at the S.H.A.M.E. Project, we just published a profile on one of the most rancid political figures of our time, Charles Murray — a vicious right-wing sociopath and racial eugenicist who got his start as a counter-insurgency expert during the Vietnam War, using starvation and crop destruction as a means of "behavior control" on restive Thai villages.

Murray’s fraudulent racial eugenics theories "proving" that blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior gained a foothold in mainstream discourse, thanks to Andrew Sullivan. What’s more disturbing is that even as Sullivan has disavowed some of his far-right causes of the past — like smearing critics of America’s wars as traitors, denouncing "decadent" coastal America, denouncing what he called the "libidinal pathology" of gay sexual culture, smearing anyone not with the Likud program as anti-Semitic, and so on — the one far-right belief he won’t let go of is racial intelligence, "human biodiversity" and the whole range of rancid Nazi eugenics revived in 1994 by Charles Murray’s discredited book, The Bell Curve.

The horrible irony is that thanks to our collective amnesia, most people today mistakenly identify Andrew Sullivan’s punditry with intellectual courage — that he turned against Bush’s war earlier than most of his fellow neocon pundits, supposedly at great risk to his reputation and "brand" because he turned on the very same bloodthirsty war mob he'd been organizing and firing up for years — lending him contrarian credibility... despite his record of viciously attacking critics of Bush’s war as traitors, collaborators with terrorism and evil, at a time when being targeted as a national traitor by a major media figure like Sullivan was genuinely dangerous to a critic’s career.

People are already forgetting the ugly explosion of McCarthyism in this country around the invasion of Iraq and the months afterwards, just as they’ve forgotten the attack dog role that Andrew Sullivan played in all of that, before his allegedly "brave" turn away from Bush and towards a safer weathervane politics of libertarianism and Obama-boosterism.

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By any standard involving "merit" Andrew Sullivan should have been driven out of the journalism world decades ago, almost as soon as his "meteoric rise" began. In 1991, Marty Peretz apparently grew frustrated with his editors — Hendrik Hertzberg, Michael Kinsley, Morton Kondracke, all Beltway fixtures in the 80s liberal establishment — so he hired an outsider with almost no experience, a 28-year-old Thatcherite named Andrew Sullivan, to run the New Republic and take the nearly century-old liberal institution hard-rightward, and downward.

Almost immediately, Sullivan proudly took credit for running one of the most damaging right-wing hit jobs against genuine investigative journalism of the past few decades: A New Republic cover story fraudulently "debunking" the October Surprise story. Briefly: In 1991, PBS’ Frontline ran an investigation making a strong case that top Reagan officials cut a secret deal with Ayatollah Khomeini’s agents during the 1980 election campaign, in which the Iranians promised to help Reagan defeat Carter by holding on to the American hostages until after the elections, and in return, the Reagan Administration would arrange secret arms shipments to Khomeini for his war with Iraq. Carter was unable to work out a deal with Iran; Reagan won the election; and the hostages were freed during his inauguration ceremony; and the secret arms shipments to Khomeini became the Iran-Contra Scandal.

By late 1991, the evidence of an October Surprise was so great that a Congressional committee was formed to investigate. That’s when 28-year-old Andrew Sullivan hired Steve Emerson — recently named one of America's five most influential promoters of Islamophobic hate propaganda, cited twice by Anders Breivik in his manifesto — to "debunk" the reporting on the October Surprise with a cover story headlined "What October Surprise?" that relied on invented evidence later exposed as fake and disowned even by Emerson.

To read the entire article please go here.

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Please consider viewing this video interview with Michael Widlanski, author of Battle for Our Minds, which is related to the assertion of "Islamophobia hate propaganda" addressed in the above article outlined in bold.