It sure doesn’t look hopeful. This piece by Media Matters, Manufacturing consent, stifling dissent by Jamison Foser http://tinyurl.com/23oxje coupled with Glenn Greenwald’s dissections sure argues against it. Seems like there is this overwhelming accumulation of evidence to suggest the partisan argument takes precedence.

I still can’t help but sense that each argument operates on a slightly different level than the other. It’s not just a directional difference, but maybe a dimensional difference as well. But I also sure can’t articulate how that might work.

http://www.attytood.com/2007/09/the_neocon_link_to_the_ABC_new.html

Their was a guy six years ago who had been doing a regular op ed in the L.A. Times. He was a Nam and Desert Storm Vet.
On the eve of the invasion, he wrote that he was supporting Bush; and believing the stated reasons for going to war. Not because he found them convincing; but because the alturnative… to accept that after Vietnam our leaders could get away with bullshiting the country into a corner once again was just too awful to accept.

I wrote the guy some pointed e-mails; which he wrote very gracious responeses too. Not long after that; as you can imagine, his collum stopped appearing.

The failed link I had posted to Media Matters delt with the New York Times. After a tacky, factualy empty hit piece on Clinton years ago; the Times issued a very pissy and actually inadaquate retraction. To this day, however, if you review the matter on Nexus, you still get the incorrected version of the facts.

Why are we in Iraq?

Don’t hold back, Sammy. Let it all drool out…

However, if you spend any time hanging around journalists, (which I strongly reccomend against, because as a group they are not noticeably more intelligent then people in the garment or reatuarant business and, on balance, are far less fun,) you hear, over and over again, the idea that they are brave independant scholars and intellectuals who have free reign to say what they will. The fact that they all say the same things at the same times isn’t even acknowledged to be a coincidence. Instead, it is offered as proof that journalists are remarkably professional and sage.

This is why you can always open a paper or magazine and read about awards journalists give other journalists, or click on the TV and watch a journalist interviewing a juornalist.

And that is why you never read articles by journalists about why they have to write as opposed to what they want to write. Working journalists are just like fry-cooks at MacDonalds: they can’t say anything they want about their employer, without getting fired.

After that, mainstream journalists are reactionaries who live in the 19th century.

The idea that you need to cover the White House by attending a Presidential speech is a pretty good one, so long as the date of the speech is before 1880.

Any journalist who is actually smart and capable and is actually able to report and comment now has a web presence, and thus readers. Goodbye “Journalism,” and good riddance.

As it happens, more Americans like to read about “horse race” politics than like to read about policy analysis.

This is why the NY Post has more readers than the New York Time, which has more readers than The New Yorker, which has more readers than The Nation.

The comments above tha point to the laziness/coziness/fecklessness of Washington mediocre media scribes are certainly valid, but they do nothing at all to explain WHY that is or HOW to correct it.

The problem is our consumerist culture and the way entertainment permeates all media.

The cultural and political paradigms that led us inexorably into the Iraq war are far more a product of Hollywood than it is of the Columbia School of Journalism.

Almost every supporter of the war I’ve ever heard from seems to think it’s a movie, not somthing that’s actually happening. They view it first and foremost as a psychodrama in which the key to victory is scaring the bad guys really really bad.

The NY Times works long and hard to push up against this cultural paradigm, but at the end of the day, it remains within it, as it must if it seeks to avoid the fate of The Nation, The Progressive and so on and so forth, i.e. the dozens of very good publications crammed with in-depth, insight and analysis of what’s going on in our world.

Shifting the cultural paradigm is a huge project and journalism is kind of at the ass end of of it really, not the forefront.

The New Yorker
Mark Halperin and the transformation of the Washington establishment.
by David Grann
October 25, 2004

…Mostly, though, Halperin collects leaks and scuttlebutt from the campaign consultants, strategists, pollsters, pundits, and journalists who make up the modern-day political establishment, or what Halperin calls “the Gang of 500.”

“We try to channel what the chattering class is chattering about, and to capture the sensibility, ethos, and rituals of the Gang of 500, which still largely sets the political agenda for the country,” Halperin explained during one of several recent conversations…

Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday April 24, 2007 08:25 EST
David Halberstam on today’s American press
http://tinyurl.com/ywnrts

David Halberstam’s speech
Columbia Journalism Award – May 18, 2005 http://tinyurl.com/25fxy7

No there were souces questioning the whole idea but Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) has been the best from the start but they are not in the first tier whan it comes to influence. And broadcast and cable news? Dare I ask? Maybe if Peter Arnett were still around.

Look, read the last speech that the late, great David Halberstam gave. I think Glenn Greenwald links to it on a column of his last week. I think he explains it all.

And don’t knock the influence of all those columnists and pundits. They set the tone of what is acceptible and what is not. The assignment editors read them and then shape stories to fit the “Narrative.” Once upon a time that narrative had Shrub as Prince Hal and Rummy and Colin as exalted grown-ups and weren’t we lucky to have them in charge!

Well all that has changed. But even the dense ones who fault Bush haven’t admitted their role. And aside from Miller, whose downfall came for other reasons, who has paid a price for being so spectacularly, catastrophically, wrong?

Not Broder
Not Freidman
Not Ignatius
Not Hoagland

You get the idea.

I note, for example, that you give the Post credit for Cheney and Walter Reed (great stories!) but you don’t mention the Secret CIA Prisons story or the Abramoff coverage (which won a Pulitzer and arguably drove a number of people out of power).

That got me. I decided I needed to pay closer attention, and try to be more alert to what was done well. Credit where credit is due, and all.

If I take a caution-at-all-costs view, then I guess I’d have to say that: Harold Meyerson, Dan Froomkin, Anne Hull and Dana Priest (Walter Reed and VA; WaPo), Barton Gellman and Jo Becker (Cheney; WaPo), NY Times deputy editor David Shipley who published “The War as We Saw It” (I think), Paul Krugman, and Janye Mayer The Black Sites: CIA’s secret interrogation program (New Yorker) are all aberrations. I’m sure someone else could extend the list; this is just what came to mind.

Whether those folks are sufficient to offset the likes of: Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Michael Gordon, etc. I have no clue. But that email exchange shamed me into trying to be a little more alert, and recognize that some of the reporting I thought so highly of were done by very skilled folks, who still have their sense of ethics clutched firmly in their hands, and often wrote the kinds of stories that likely took weeks, if not months, to put together. And, somewhere, there was an editor behind all of that, too. Memo to self: don’t toss the baby with the bathwater.

http://tinyurl.com/2ht3vc

+++++++++++++++++

Why does this surprise you, coming from a guy who was a regular guest host for The Rush Limbaugh Show and ocassional host for The O’Reilly Factor before moving to Fox?

1. Reporters have editors. What they edit is what gets in.

2. It does not pay, literally, to stray off the reservation. See Mark Danner and Robert Perry. Both paid a stiff price for their reports from Central America that went against the official line the Reagan Adm. was giving out. If you’re a family man and work for a major oulet like the NYT or NEWSWEEK with a good paycheck and excellent benefits (medical, dental, retirement etc.) you’ll think long and hard about what you’ll write.

I discussed the phenomenon of the Pundicoracy of DC behaving, as Digby says, like Junior HS Heathers. How else to explain Quinn, Broder, and their ilk determining who is “In” and who isn’t in “their” town. Frankly their moans about the “dirty Hippies” in the blogispher has much to do with snottu new kids challenging their turf. And, apparentley winning.

“The Clintonisates will never forgive Gerth for his articles on Whitewater, but who cares?” -Marc Cooper

So, what are you supposed to say? Yes, we know that the National Media follows, in fact creates, a narrative and sticks to it. Yes, we know that Republicans behave as if they will always have their President in power (they did this in ratioanizing Watergate as well); and that the Tony Snows will see these issues compleatly differently should said Media let down it’s guard enough to let allow the Democrates to win. Or have one of these tasty examples won’t you? They’re so easy, you just pop them into the microwave. O.k., how would the national media and the Tony Snows have reacted if Bill Clinton had issued blanket instructions to his White House that they were to ignore the supenas of The House of Representatives?

So the question becomes, are the Republicans wise in feeling that way? Somehow I think when and if a Dem is elected in 2008, the likes of Woody will reach into that dusty junk drawer; reach past the NASCAR Cards and paper clips, and yank out a copy of something called The U.S. Constitution. I don’t think he’ll have any trouble finding newly liberated voices in the Washington Press Corp to carry his water. Then, I think, the idea of a President signing bills and winking that he didn’t have to actually FOLLOW the law will be a lot less tolerated.

To an extent, such are the checks and balances that are supposed to make the system work. Or they would be, if we were not living in a country were one party’s President is hamstrung by the country’s most powerful newspaper for things the President didn’t do 11 years before; and one party’s president can smirk off questions about it’s catastrophes seven years down the line.

“The Clintonisates will never forgive Gerth for his articles on Whitewater, but who cares?” -Marc Cooper

So, what are you supposed to say? Yes, we know that the National Media follows, in fact creates, a narrative and sticks to it. Yes, we know that Republicans behave as if they will always have their President in power (they did this in ratioanizing Watergate as well); and that the Tony Snows will see these issues compleatly differently should said Media let down it’s guard enough to let allow the Democrates to win. Or have one of these tasty examples won’t you? They’re so easy, you just pop them into the microwave. O.k., how would the national media and the Tony Snows have reacted if Bill Clinton had issued blanket instructions to his White House that they were to ignore the supenas of The House of Representatives?

So the question becomes, are the Republicans wise in feeling that way? Somehow I think when and if a Dem is elected in 2008, the likes of Woody will reach into that dusty junk drawer; reach past the NASCAR Cards and paper clips, and yank out a copy of something called The U.S. Constitution. I don’t think he’ll have any trouble finding newly liberated voices in the Washington Press Corp to carry his water. Then, I think, the idea of a President signing bills and winking that he didn’t have to actually FOLLOW the law will be a lot less tolerated.

To an extent, such are the checks and balances that are supposed to make the system work. Or they would be, if we were not living in a country were one party’s President is hamstrung by the country’s most powerful newspaper for things the President didn’t do 11 years before; and one party’s president can smirk off questions about it’s catastrophes seven years down the line.