Howell Raines and "Redneck America"

They conceal (sorta-kinda) their political beliefs while running big media organizations. After they're fired, an no longer required to pretend, the truth comes out:

Raines also embraces tacitly the “false consciousness� explanation of the foolish behavior of the masses, an excuse beloved of Marxist intellectuals to explain the failure of the proletariat to embrace their vanguard. Most recently this has been popularized among the vulgar intelligentsia by Thomas Frank in this recent minor bestseller in liberal circles too lazy to read more explicitly Marxist theoretical journals. In this excuse for the stubborn populartity of conservative ideas, the foolish yahoos are being manipulated by Wall Street puppeteers (not Jon Corzine or Robert Rubin or George Soros, of course). The condescension drips:

The Bushes believe in letting the hoi polloi control the social and religious restrictions flowing from Washington, so long as Wall Street gets to say what happens to the nation’s money. The Republican party as a national institution has endorsed this trade-off. What we do not know yet is whether a Republican party without a Bush at the top is seedy enough to keep it going.

“Hoi polloi� is actually the more respectful term he employs for mainstream conservatives. A bit earlier in elucidating the treachery of the Bush-Walker-Daddy Warbucks Crime Family, Raines causally threw out a racial epithet:

He [George W. Bush] adopted the full agenda of redneck America.

The standard response is that while these people have political beliefs (how could they not? they always ask) they are able to compartmentalize their politics from their reportage and editorial decisions.

Nonsense. When your hatred of "redneck America" and the Republicans is that visceral, and there's no one around offering a contrary point of view, it's just not possible to insulate what you write from what you actually believe.

posted by Ace at 01:24 PM

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