| Thursday, July 22, 2004 |
20:23 - There's the truth... and there's The Truth!
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20040721
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Of all the subject matter Garry Trudeau could have chosen for Doonesbury this week, is anybody out there surprised that he'd pick OutFoxed?
Trudeau seems to really be reaching for his satiric muse, though, and she may be getting tired of having been groped so often. Here's today's strip:
Now, let me just be sure I'm understanding this right: An editor sends out a memo to professional journalists that asks them not to editorialize... and Trudeau sees this as evidence of an agenda?
So he's saying that the only way for journalists not to be biased is for them to feel free to "mourn the loss of U.S troops and wonder out loud why we're there"? The only way for journalists not to be biased is to editorialize? Am I getting this right, Garry?
Ye gods. He really is far gone, isn't he? But yet this strip, at first reading, sounds damning, doesn't it? As long as you don't think too hard about it.
This is another prime example of those pernicious and malleable sound bites that are only scandalous if you announce them in just the right tone of voice. It's exactly like Michael Moore's snide comments about Bush finishing reading My Pet Goat with those third-graders for seven minutes after hearing about the second tower being hit. If the school's principal relates that tale, audience members well might say, "What a guy!" and "Those poor kids—good for Bush, letting them finish having their special moment, instead of going crazy right there in the room!" and "Now that's being calm and collected—imagine how sick he must have felt inside, yet he did what he knew was important!" But if Moore describes the scene, using the same words but adding a sneering tone and an ominous soundrack, the audience says, "What an idiot!" and "He's incompetent!" and "I'll bet he was in on it!"
By that same technique does Garry Trudeau guide his readers into a mindset where a memo from Fox's top editors asking his anchorpeople not to dish on-camera about how the war is wrong is grand evidence of the dread evil of Rupert Murdoch's extremist, worse-than-al-Jazeera propaganda network.
Jeez. I almost hope this isn't the worst of the slings and arrows that OutFoxed has to hurl, because it's pretty frickin' pathetic.
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Brian Tiemann
