{"id":3362,"date":"2009-07-08T08:54:40","date_gmt":"2009-07-08T13:54:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=3362"},"modified":"2009-07-08T08:54:40","modified_gmt":"2009-07-08T13:54:40","slug":"the-goal-of-the-commentariat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=3362","title":{"rendered":"The Goal of the Commentariat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ellen Barry of the New York Times<\/em> quotes Russian “television commentator Mikhail V. Leontyev<\/a>, who has built a career on his relentless hectoring of the West” on what he does<\/p>\n

My task on television is to verbalize, in a certain formula, the real public consciousness that exists. So people will hear what they want to hear. So they can say, \u2018Yes, that is what I thought!’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My impression is that Barry was trying to convey the idea that Leontyev was a propagandist for the Russian state – but his explanation of his job struck me as a pretty honest description of what most talking heads and columnists aim for – and what Glenn Greenwald so derides – as they claim to and aspire to explain what the American people think about a matter.<\/p>\n

It’s always a bit fuzzy though – in either state-controlled media or our more free press at home – whether these thoughts are what people thought before, or if these ideas have been planted by the commentator – or if there instead exists some delicate balance between the two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ellen Barry of the New York Times quotes Russian “television commentator Mikhail V. Leontyev, who has built a career on his relentless hectoring of the West” on what he does My task on television is to verbalize, in a certain formula, the real public consciousness that exists. So people will hear what they want to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[642,66,458],"tags":[2024,2023,148],"class_list":["post-3362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-russia-foreign-policy","category-the-media","category-the-opinionsphere","tag-ellen-barry","tag-mikhail-v-leontyev","tag-the-new-york-times"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qcx-Se","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3362"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3366,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3362\/revisions\/3366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}