Bishop: The Great White Wail - Moby [Dick], a Spook Story
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Richard Melville Hall, aka Moby, has sold more than 20 million albums. You can’t prove why by me, albeit his uninteresting electronic tracks at least seem to have a melody.
But Moby did something interesting last week, telling a radio interviewer that CIA agents asked him to use social media to spread the gospel of the Steele dossier, to write a 21st century sequel to the Manchurian Candidate.
Just as with the Steele Dossier, it is quite difficult to credit much of what Moby said. He undermined his own credibility the next day by tweeting: “Ha, no, the CIA didn't ask me to post about Trump & Russia”. But he said in the same tweet he had friends in “other intelligence agencies” with genuine concern that Trump is desperate for a war. It is hard to credit this denial any more than the original claim. Is this walking back tales told out of school? Is he whole thing made up or was Moby simply unwise to uncork Pandora’s bottle?
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTOf course Moby is in full throated resistance mode here, intending no doubt to give credence to the fantasies of the Steele Dossier by alleging that the adults in the room are worried about Trump. Of course, what he succeeded in doing was demonstrating the petulance of the childish resistance and discrediting both himself and his contacts.
But what really struck home about this incident is that the high water mark for reporting it was the tabloid NY Daily News. The NY Times, which took careful note of Moby’s attendance on Barack Obama’s inauguration, didn’t deign to mention his excursion into the role of a pop culture James Bond saving the world from Trump.
Why, you might wonder, does the NY Times see fit to report on every word DeNiro has to say about Trump, but Moby hit the cutting room floor? If Moby would have, like DeNiro, simply cursed the president, he might well have made the Times. But he committed the unpardonable sin of complicating rather than advancing the resistance narrative.
Moby’s fable about the CIA may have some grain of truth to it. But it hardly helps the cause of convincing the public that the Russians employed duplicitous means to tarnish Hilary Clinton and co-opt Trump to announce that the CIA is engaged in precisely the same behavior.
After all, the news isn’t that the CIA did X or Y, which they may or may not have, but that Moby says they did. Now one can hardly nitpick whether every unstable supposition about world events constitutes news. But, as a general rule, the mainstream media dwells upon the ‘wisdom’ of the glitterati – if for no other reason than they sell papers . . . eer views. Moby might be a little washed up as a Gen Xer looking for relevance with millenials, but his antics could certainly sell papers.
And its not only the Times, that couldn’t see fit to cover all the s#%t that fits. The Bezos Post was right on its heels running away from the story. Of course refusing to embarrass the CIA couldn’t have anything to do with being in bed with them? And for good measure the MSM networks ABC, CBS and NBC didn’t lend their voices. Of the news tabloids, Fox did chime in. Well of course they like covering anything that might embarrass the resistance so you can’t award points for that.
Trump invites the cynical coverage he gets, but the MSM is one predictable bunch. It isn’t enough to be treated to the juicy trail of leaks and gossip that leads to the President, to fill pages with speculations on his mental health. The oh so predictable pass taken on any story that doesn’t qualify as the fastest path to impeachment reveals again and again the perspective in the media. The news isn’t so much fake as slanted. It’s been that way since broadsheets. Its just the airs put on the by those who claim to be engaged in journalism that distinguishes today’s news, or lack thereof.
Brian Bishop is on the board of OSTPA and has spent 20 years of activism protecting property rights, fighting over regulation and perverse incentives in tax policy.
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