A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

A Great Voice, and a Good Friend, Leaves Us

Eric Boehlert was the model media critic-and much, much more.

The shock of the death of my friend and comrade Eric Boehlert

is more than I have yet been able even to assimilate. Eric was a mensch
in every sense of the word. Personally, he was a model of decency, good
humor, and generous instincts. Like so many of us, he was furious at the
countless failings of our mainstream media, the purposeful lies of those
who exploit these for the benefit of those who would destroy our
liberties, our planet, and what remains of the meager protections
offered to the most vulnerable among us. But unlike most of us, he not
only did something about it in a fashion that often made me tired just
to think about, much less to keep up with, but did so with a genial,
often funny, ironic attitude that should prove a model to those of us
who often find that (entirely justified) anger is getting the best of
us.

For the tiniest example of what I mean, here
is a tweet
from Eric that, I swear, I read aloud to my partner just the other
night:

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One of the rituals I've embraced in writing this newsletter has been
to wait to read Eric's Press Run columns until after I've drafted my
own. I did this because had I read them first, I would likely have
allowed myself to be overly influenced by his observations and
reporting, and I wished to avoid this. But I also knew it would be
irresponsible to write almost anything about the media in any given week
without knowing what Eric had uncovered and/or revealed. I can't tell
you how many times I had to throw away items because Eric had done them
sooner and better; or how many items came to my readers much improved
because he had noticed connections I had missed or whose significance I
initially failed to understand. His never-ending string of tweets went a
long way toward justifying Twitter's existence, if such a thing is
even possible.

Eric and I became friends decades ago. We worked together briefly and
went to concerts and sometimes conferences together. He and his family
visited mine on vacation once or twice. But mostly I experienced Eric
the way his hundreds of thousands of fans and followers did: as perhaps
the most tireless and relentless media critic in all of America. To be
honest, I don't know how he did it. I find watching cable TV news to
be soul-destroying and have banished it from my life. But Eric appeared
to catch everything and expose (or mock) it by doing so in context, a
rarity in our benighted political discourse.

Eric and I did not have identical political views. He was less apt to
criticize mainstream Democratic Party figures like Hillary Clinton or
Chuck Schumer than I am, as well as some of their surrogates on MSNBC.
Even so, it was a rare moment indeed when Eric and I did not end up in a
similar political place. I make this distinction not to hold my path up
as necessarily superior, but to point out that while Eric stuck to
criticizing sins committed against Democrats rather than those of which
its members were sometimes guilty, he never strayed from the truth. The
integrity of his work speaks to the profound difference between the two
sides in our political discourse and the most significant failing of the
mainstream media. Eric was a Democratic Party partisan and stuck to
honest, evidence-based arguments. It is literally impossible to identify
a Republican Party partisan who does so, because to argue on behalf of
that party is to give oneself over to lies. Never mind the racism, the
homophobia, the sexism, the ethnocentrism, and the Marjorie Taylor
Greene-level insanity. It's a party built on lies. It no longer has
any honest partisans. Its supporters in the media are, if they believe
themselves to be journalists, by definition betraying their readers by
participating in what Hannah Arendt described as the "consistent and
total substitution of lies for factual truth."
The
very fact of the honesty and decency of Eric's work tells us of the
moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the mainstream media's commitment
to bothsidesism, together with the dangers it poses to the future of our
democracy.

Tributes to Eric went up quickly on Wednesday. Charles Pierce wrote:
"He was 57, but his spirit was decades younger and his wisdom was
decades older, and that's just the way that was, too
,"
and James Fallows wrote this post in his honor
. But
even more so, I also urge you to check out not only Eric's wonderful
Twitter feed and the back issues of
Press Run columns, but also and most
especially his two books: Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush

and Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press
.

My deepest condolences go to Eric's wife Tracy and their children. As
for the rest of us, once the shock and the pain have passed, well,
let's all try to make his memory a blessing.

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So, it's sort of official: We are going to let the planet go to hell
to the point where it will become uninhabitable for hundreds of millions
of people. There are many culprits in this process. Frogs do not
actually allow themselves to be boiled slowly-they jump out of the
water-but planets do. Being inanimate objects, they have no choice.

As The Observer's Fiona Harvey reports
:
"Scientists fear that their last-ditch climate warnings are going
unheeded amid international turmoil caused by the war in Ukraine, and
soaring energy prices." This is their conclusion based on the release
of the third segment of the landmark scientific report from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, likely its last one "to be
published while there is still time to avoid the worst ravages of
climate breakdown." It is warning, Harvey writes, "that the world is
not shifting quickly enough to a low-carbon economy." Moreover, it is
also regardless of the fact that "the previous instalment

of the vast report-known as working group 2 of the IPCC
-was published a month
ago, just as Russia invaded Ukraine, and received only muted attention
,
despite warning of catastrophic and irreversible upheavals that can only
narrowly be avoided

by urgent action now." This is obviously not going to happen. We've
been to this movie many times before, and while each version keeps
getting scarier, they are also becoming ever more predictable.

What is perhaps most depressing about the IPCC report is that just a
little adjustment regarding our use of fossil fuels would go a long way
toward addressing the crisis-and yet, for political reasons, this
turns out to be impossible. Here

again is Harvey: "The world can still hope to stave off the worst
ravages of climate breakdown but only through a 'now or never' dash
to a low-carbon economy and society, scientists have said in what is in
effect a final warning for governments on the climate. Greenhouse gas
emissions must peak by 2025, and can be nearly halved this decade,
according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to
give the world a chance of limiting future heating to 1.5C above
pre-industrial levels ... The final cost of doing so will be minimal,
amounting to just a few percent of global GDP by mid-century, though it
will require a massive effort by governments, businesses and
individuals."

In fact, the opposite is happening. "Soaring energy prices and the war
in Ukraine have prompted governments to rethink their energy policies.
Many countries-including the US, the UK and the EU-are considering
ramping up fossil fuels

as part of their response." There are countless culprits in this
story. You (and I) are likely among them. But I have to agree with Joe
Biden that, in this context, as in so many others, while it may be a
close contest with say, the Koch brothers, it is Rupert Murdoch who in
this, as in so many other contexts, is the "most dangerous man in the
world
."
If you want to know why, I suggest you read Eric Boehlert on "The
Murdoch Cancer
," or
Eric Boehlert on "How Rupert Murdoch Pushed Australia Into a Climate
Change Retreat
,"
or yours truly, quoting Eric Boehlert, on "The Wall Street Journal
Riddle
."
Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.

I leave you with this video of one of the two nights in March 2009 when
Eric Clapton joined the Allman Brothers at the Beacon Theatre
for an incredible 54-minute set. It was
already a wonderful memory for me, but it will now always be both sadder
and sweeter because I got to share it with my friend and comrade Eric
Boehlert
.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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