Flock of hair-dos: Dan Froomkin writes the often-controversial “White House Briefing” column in the online edition of the Washington Post. He has an article up today at Watchdog Blog in which he proposes that the Old Media journalists may be close to losing their relevance, primarily because they steadfastly refuse to call bullshit when they hear it:
Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do.
What is it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that makes them so refreshing and attractive to a wide variety of viewers (including those so-important younger ones)? I would argue that, more than anything else, it is that they enthusiastically call bullshit.
Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. The relentless spinning is enough to make anyone dizzy, and some of our most important political battles are about competing views of reality more than they are about policy choices. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.
What strikes me is that these same expensively coiffed Kool Kids in the Capitol were all too eager to call bushwa on Pres. Clinton but have treated George W. Bush with kids gloves from the getgo — even prior to the 9/11 attacks.
Why the change in dynamics? My theory about this is that the journalists in D.C. looked down on Bill Clinton because a) he was a hick from Arkansas (Rhodes Scholar, pish-pish!) and b) they made four times as much money as he did even on his salary as president. Conversely, this same group sees the Bushes, whose family fortune is in the millions, as aristocrats — literally as their “betters” — and so treat them with deference.
This makes the Washington press corps the highest paid and most elaborately be-wigged courtiers since the reign of Louis XIV.
But Froomkin’s central point is key: Until the midterm elections last month, these journalists stood as the last bastion for democracy against a six year onslaught by Republicans to convert America from a republic to a corporatist oligarchy. Generally, they have been derelict in their duty. The Democrats won back the Congress despite the so-called liberal media. It is telling that within days after the voting the cable newsers were ignoring the infighting and disarray among Republicans and focusing instead on Speaker-to-Be Nancy Pelosi’s clothes and botox treatments.
If the United States survives the Bush era, it won’t be because the media stopped the GOP from systematically shredding the Constitution but because the Republicans’ incompetence at (or lack of interest in) governing caused them to fail.
They’re not derelict in duty because, in the first place, MSM is in the service of the powers that be. And never is that service more critical than when a president is dead-set on going to war, being that the people say no and what happens? No war, that’s what. But then where will our president be? He’ll be getting ready for Congress to impeach him, whereupon he’d be on his way to the International Court of Criminal Justice, to be tried there for his crimes against humanity. What then? That’ll he up to us. And just think, all this made possible by our seeing to it that Congress passes the Kucinich bill that cuts off all funding for the Iraq war. Change the world, anyone?