If you would consistently read Powerline or DailyKos, or any random coupling of right-left blog dichotomy--and considering that you are among those (seemingly in the minority) who do not necessarily believe yourself to be in the one (or other) camp which is perpetually besieged by some great media monolith--you may find yourself wondering if you are actually falling into this era's version of False Memory Syndrome. We are under almost constant barrage from one side or the other that insists that not only is the other side secretly (how secretly is open to interpretation, of course--secret usually implies that evidence is hard to uncover) angling to infect our brains and opinions with either anti-US, anti-Freedom, anti-Goodness viruses. What constitutes the antis depends, of course, on what side you find yourself.
Against the war? You're a true patriot. For the war? You're a true patriot. Hanging out in Crawford, TX? Wacko anti-American commie bastards. Refusing to meet with an unhinged though sympathetic protester? Callous corporate whore chickenhawk asshole. You get the idea.
The media themselves are starting to exhibit the same type of sundering taking place largely because of their own goading paranoia. In this Sunday's NYT Book Review, Bill Keller, editor of the Times, makes the unusual tactic of writing to, and criticizing an article in his own paper. In response to an essay from July 31 by Richard Posner, Keller and cohorts Bill Moyers and Eric Alterman (follow link and page jumps) answer with almost Shakespearean protest.
The squabbling is fairly typical left-right guano tossing and I'll leave it to any interested reader to start with Posner's essay and then get into the counter-arguments.
What caught my eye more than the predictable umbrage is Keller's invocation of journalism as not a craft, or even a profession, but an evangelical calling:
The saddest thing is that Judge Posner's market determinism leaves no room for the other dynamics I've witnessed in my 35 years in newspapers: the idealism of reporters who think they can make the world better...
Pardon me for being either ignorant or naive, but isn't a reporter's first responsibility the finding--and publishing--of the truth? And isn't it at least possible that this drive "to make the world better" is at the core of the media's current malaise? My point here is that if one goes into a job with a zeal to transform the world, instead of a zeal to tell the world's stories, isn't it more likely that one would search for and "find" those stories that serve to support and reinforce one's own prejudices?
I understand that this better-world philosophy has been around for some time now, and journalists like to think of themselves as a type of secular prelacy, who must not only report but interpret for the great unanointed (Keller pulls a nice slight of hand early on in his letter by saying that Posner, "may despise the media, dear reader, but Posner doesn't think much of you, either" because Posner proposes that the popular consensus that drives media coverage--of which Posner utilizes tired cliches--is "dumb" and "vicious") while insisting that every last reporter out in the land is Studs Terkel.
I am not inclined to dig for the chicken-egg beginning of the closeting of American media. For instance, what indeed came first, the public's disinterest in the rest of the world or the media's assumption that it already exists?
Or for a domestic example, if I must, it is becoming harder and harder to distinguish between "serious" reporting and "infotainment" when news outlets cruise for ratings based on stories they themselves promote beyond all proportion. At least Bob Costas, in his own little way, stands up to CNN and by extension to FOX by refusing to spend one more minute of air time on Aruba-thon. Greta, meanwhile, has made more news by vacationing longer than the president than she did by leaving CNN for FOX and getting some botox on the way from Atlanta to Manhattan. She does look great in a tan, however.
It would have been more interesting if Posner was a journalist, but only slightly so. Still, the right-left tiff has effectively moved from the battle over media itself to the battle within the media on how to report the Iraq war. Okay, maybe battle is too strong a word. Let's try introspective discussion. This is mostly left media's sudden epiphany that maybe Iraq coverage has been a little to much "making the world better" and not enough truth-telling. The right media, however, is still running in circles with its fingers in its ears, refusing to tell the whole truth and thereby aligning themselves with their leftist brethren by demonstrating disdain for those reading their words. Bad news, you see, will turn us weak-minded consumers of news into a hundred million Cindy Sheehans. By trying to ignore real problems, Iraq war supporters sow enough doubt that the anti-war crowd starts to look not so crazy. After all, if the administration and its proxies withhold the basic truths of the war, what else is being obfuscated?
Media's evangelism was, I think, born in labor strife of the crucible era, and came of age during the Vietnam war and Watergate. But the church is crumbling and apostates are rising and leaving the flock in droves. Meanwhile, the cardinals are arguing over the color of their particular vestments.
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