http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2010/12/the-new-york-times-in-the-americas/ Informed reflection on the events of the day Wed, 15 Jul 2015 17:00:00 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.23 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2010/12/the-new-york-times-in-the-americas/comment-page-1/#comment-26230 Fri, 07 Dec 2012 18:13:00 +0000 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/?p=1011#comment-26230 The third paragraph is full of empty slogans. A critical intervention would analyze slogans, not reproduce them verbatim.

]]> http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2010/12/the-new-york-times-in-the-americas/comment-page-1/#comment-2469 Sun, 05 Dec 2010 15:38:05 +0000 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/?p=1011#comment-2469 A friend has asked me if the central issue at stake in The New York Times’ coverage of Argentina is that those reporting are assuming a “populist turn” in the country. That’s a good point, since the correspondents, out of intellectual laziness, are indeed probably assuming a populist turn in Argentina along the lines of Venezuela or Ecuador. But that doesn’t resist the most basic analysis. So I just attempted to introduce a couple of more dimensions to the question: the sociological type of milieu reporters inhabit while abroad, plus the lack of understanding of the workings of democratic politics. It is the latter that makes them conflate (unexpectedly, as Laclau does) politics as such with populism. Here is were the empty place reference makes its appearance: in the US, power is so colonized by money – that is, “power as an empty place” is so threatened by plutocratic tendencies – that any political agency that goes against that mutation is seen as an authoritarian excess. In particular, that happens from a perspective so influenced by financial analysts that, naturally, ends up seen actual democratic politics as a threat.

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