Chris Hayes FTW
by digby
I wrote a piece for Salon today about the war porn the cable TV news networks are broadcasting into America’s living rooms. I recount the days after 9/11 when the media went wild and ushered in the Iraq war without any skepticism or dissent. I recount the particular case of MSNBC which famously fired anti-war Phil Donohue with Chris Matthews quoted in the press saying that Donohue would “bring down the network.” And I may have mentioned the political response, like Huckleberry’s calm and thoughtful analysis :
“This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed here at home!!!”
But there have been a couple of exceptions this time, with Chris hayes leading the pack:
For months he’s been making the case that this lurid coverage is not only creating the conditions for war without any proper debate, it’s playing into the terrorists’ hands. When Fox’s Bill O’Reilly recently declared that we are in a “Holy War” with Islam, Hayes said on his program:
“That sort of rhetoric is, of course, exactly what ISIS wants. For if this is a Holy War, they aren’t some murderous cult or some fringe Sunni militia. No, if it’s a Holy War, then they are the representatives of Islam, which is why the president at today’s summit on countering violent extremism was so careful not to cast the fight on those terms.”
These terrorists produce this propaganda for recruitment purposes but produce them with slick production values for U.S. and other western media in order to try to make the US the common enemy of all Islam. Hayes is one of the only cable news hosts to explicitly challenge not only the Holy War meme, but the reaction of the media to every alleged threat.
But he is on the same page with one very unlikely Fox News personality. Here’s Laura Ingraham, of all people, talking about the shopping mall threat assessment:
“I don’t think we should jump every time the freaks with the ACE bandages around their faces put out videos… I think we should have a mature debate about how to secure the Homeland without changing our way of life.”
When she’s right, she’s right. Hayes responded with this:
Amen sister. I was incredibly gratified to see Laura Ingraham making essentially the same point about terrorist propaganda that we have been making consistently on this show which is that everyone needs to stay calm and rational in the face of what is obviously emotional manipulation, by people whom we all agree are invested in our emotional manipulation and who achieve emotional manipulation in large part with propaganda videos demonstrating their brutal tactics. But the ability of Al-Shabaab or Boko Haram or ISIS to murder people they’ve captured or make videos of those murders does not correlate in any meaningful way to an actual threat they pose to Americans here in the U.S. Nor does it correlate to its military potency.
He went on to discuss a a recent analysis by Zack Beauchamp showing that ISIS is, in fact, losing ground militarily and dolefully added, “if you’ve been watching the national news coverage of ISIS, Beauchamp’s report feels like it might as well be coming from Mars.”
I also make note of the fact that Matthews has again joined the war party with his usual fervor. And I wonder if, as he did in 2003, he might once more be the one whispering to the press that MSNBC isn’t going to be a “left-wing network.”
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