The Perfect Media Manners for Malia Obama

Civility and political decorum demand that one should never pick on a president's family. Presidents' children did not choose their parents' careers. Until they are grown and speaking out on the campaign trail, they should be left out of political commentary. Their privacy should not only be respected; it should be actively protected.

Pretty much the entire media observed this rule perfectly when Radar Online published blurry pictures of 18-year-old Malia Obama puffing some sort of cigarette at the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago, Illinois on July 31. Radar's eyewitness cried weed. Video footage also showed Obama dancing suggestively to a rap song.

The press refused to touch the story. Praiseworthy? Yes -- if you're willing to applaud media hypocrisy.

In the middle of 2001, the media pointed at and mocked Jenna and Barbara Bush, daughters of former President George W. Bush, when they were cited for underage margarita drinking in Austin, Texas, at age 19. The New York tabloids loved it. The story was headlined ''Double Trouble'' by the New York Daily News and ''Jenna and Tonic'' by the New York Post. The networks jumped all over it, underlining that this was the public's business because the twins had entered the police blotter, and because their father is a recovered alcoholic.

CNN's Wolf Blitzer also sounded the alarm: "Police in Austin, Texas today cited President Bush's twin daughters for violating state alcoholic beverage laws. Questions about the incident remain off limits at the White House. As CNN's Anne McDermott reminds us, all first families struggle to retain a little privacy." Apparently CNN believed the Bush family should be an exception.

Even back then, there was a police-and-progeny double standard. The year before, 17-year-old Al Gore III, son of then-Vice President Al Gore, was cited by police for driving back to Washington, D.C. from the Outer Banks of North Carolina at 97 mph in a 55-mph zone. Network coverage? Zero.

Obama gets much kinder treatment than the daughters of Republican presidential candidates. Consider the liberal website Slate, which in 2012 held a caption contest for a picture of former Sen. Rick Santorum's daughters Elizabeth and Sarah (then ages 21 and 14). Sadly, liberal commenters predictably leaped to imagine that these conservative Catholic daughters -- yes, including the middle schooler -- were on contraceptives or wearing chastity belts or touching themselves sexually.

The daughters of former Gov. Sarah Palin have faced all kinds of media shaming and mockery, starting with Bristol Palin's pregnancy at age 17, revealed just hours after Palin was named to Sen. John McCain's ticket in 2008. Gov. Palin never achieved national office, but her family has been mocked ever since.

In 2011, television host Bill Maher mocked Bristol Palin in the crudest terms: "In Bristol's new memoir, 'Not Afraid of Life' -- working title, 'Whoops, There's a Dick in Me'" -- Bristol claims that the night she lost her virginity, she had accidentally gotten drunk on wine coolers that she didn't know contained alcohol, and then blacked out and didn't remember a thing. Oh, the Palins. I tell you, the s--t doesn't fall far from the bat."

Did the media decry a lack of decency? The silence was deafening. But when previously unknown GOP congressional staffer Elizabeth Lauten criticized the clothes and attitude of President Obama's daughters two years ago on her own Facebook page, saying, "Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at a bar," the networks railed against her for "cyberbullying" until she resigned from her job.

Our news and entertainment media chieftains have made a clear distinction for presidents and presidential candidates: A child of Democratic parents is untouchable, but if it's the offspring of Republicans, he -- or even better, she -- is fair game. It's open season.

Neither control or no control is a perfect solution but I’ll stick with ‘no control’.

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

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