For reporting that is an embarrassment to the profession
of journalism, and for being beholden to corporate paymasters rather than
the citizens of America.
Congratulations to Zev Chafets!
You are the first member of the Fourth Estate to be named a BuzzFlash Media
Putz for your coverage of a BuzzFlash Media Putz; specifically your recent
New
York Times Sunday Magazine homage to Rush Limbaugh.
We want to thank nationally noted media critic and BuzzFlash reader Eric
Boehlert for
nailing Chafets for his uncritical, vanity profile of the newly minted $400
million blowhard.
Limbaugh, who is beloved by many of the white working class stiffs who have
been lured by his siren song of demagoguery, is revealed as a man of gargantuan
and ostentatious wealth, including an obscenely pretentious mansion and a
garage full of cars that each cost more than three bungalows in Cleveland.
But Chafets is not critical of this irony; he is enamored of Limbaugh the "American
success story."
Here is an excerpt of Chafets being queried about his sycophantic article
on an NPR program, "On
the Media":
BOB GARFIELD: Your piece on Limbaugh was very generous, I would
say even flattering. You seem to give him a pass for his excesses. And when
I'm talking about excesses, I'm talking about ad hominem attacks, truly mean-spirited
stuff that goes way beyond satire and into the politics of vilification,
and also playing fast and loose with the truth, seizing on some news item
and grossly misrepresenting it and creating a lot of hubbub, using as the
kernel of his satire something that is just fundamentally untrue.
ZEV CHAFETS: Well, do you have an example of that? I'm not an apologist for
Rush Limbaugh, but I'm a little bit defensive because I think that the liberal
media takes such an unfair view of him.
I hear people being vilified on the radio, on all sorts of radio stations
by all sorts of people all day long. And Limbaugh is not worse than many
of the ones I hear, even on NPR. He just has a different point of view.
BOB GARFIELD: "The NAACP should have a riot rehearsal, they should
get a liquor store and practice robberies?"
ZEV CHAFETS: Not my sense of humor, but it's not a lie.
BOB GARFIELD: Did Limbaugh not say that Abu Ghraib was no worse than a Skull
and Bones initiation?
ZEV CHAFETS: Yeah, he did. It's his opinion.
You get the feeling that Chafets, whom Boehlert calls a "Dittohead,
is actually a "Deadhead."
Surprisingly, Chafets has 10 books under his belt and writes regularly for
mainstream publications such as the NYT. But that may not be as surprising
as it seems.
At one point in the Limbaugh "portrait," Chafets reveals to us: "In
truth, Limbaugh is less a theoretician than a popularizer of what he regards
as the correct conservative responses to contemporary issues. Most of his
concerns are economic. 'I consider myself a defender of corporate America,'
he told me."
Ah, now we get to the crux of it. Limbaugh is a shill for corporate America,
and The New York Times Company is part of that corporate America. Limbaugh's
agent wouldn't have agreed to the interview and profile unless he was relatively
sure that it was going to be positive -- and he wasn't wrong.
Sure The New York Times is assailed as "liberal" by the likes of
Limbaugh, but when was the last time you saw serious and sustained coverage
in the "newspaper of record" about the economic class divisions
in America that have accelerated since the Reagan era?
What benefits corporate America benefits The New York Times Company.
And so Zev Chafets did his job well -- and for that he deserves being named
the BuzzFlash Media Putz of the Week.
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