Thursday, September 09, 2021

Good-bye to Media Myth Alert

I liked W. Joseph Campbell when I first added him to my blogroll here and elsewhere.

But, he's become tiresome. Then worse.

The tiresome? Self-alleged, self-proclaimed media corrector Campbell loves falling back on a couple of tropes, namely, how the media get it wrong that Uncle Walter Cronkite forced LBJ out of Vietnam and how the media get it wrong about the media, not John Sirica, the Supreme Court and Congress, forcing Nixon to resign.

I'm sure there's plenty of other media myths. Campbell rarely touches them, though he has discussed early era Yellow Journalism reality and myth.

That's bad enough.

The worse?

Some of his recent posts seem to have one foot in wingnut world, or at a minimum, one foot in fellow traveler world.

His post about Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, in which he chides USA Today for calling Afghanistan Biden's Katrina, with Campbell then saying it's much worse, is the last straw.

Campbell can't be bothered to mention that Trump negotiated the withdrawal, Trump met with the Taliban for these negotiations, Trump set the withdrawal date, then Trump accelerated the originally planned pace of US troops withdrawing.

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