On one thing, both the left and the right can agree. The press in this country is dysfunctional. One can argue about the overarching narrative that dysfunctionality protects, but not really very convincingly. To the extent reporters are stenographers, they reinforce corporate and governmental messages.
Huffington Post reports that Lara Logan has criticized Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings for breaking a confidentiality agreement that she presumes he must have made, though apparently the only evidence for that is the word of a person who refused to be identified. Logan is good reporter, who has the guts to put herself in harms way and actually inform herself on the issues about which she reports, but even she has bought into a destructive ethos.
She denies that real reporters, reporters like her, treat their sources with kid gloves in order to preserve access so that they can continue to write stories in which they treat their sources with kid gloves. But the access issue is real, as is the fact that too often the big media reporters identify with the people they cover.
At times, I’m discouraged by the fact that the internet is destroying conventional newspapers and, more hopefully, broadcast “journalism”, but perhaps the development has nothing but a bright side. Something will arise in its place, and there’s always the chance that journalism in the internet age will, at least for one brief shining moment, be committed by and to the type of reporter that existed before the current crop became fat and lazy transcriptionists. The framers, I truly believe, gave the press freedom because they wanted the press to be a burr in the side of politicians, not enablers or amplifiers. They did that knowing full well that they themselves would feel the heat of the press that they had protected. Witness the attacks endured by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. Of those four, only one, to his everlasting shame, ever took steps to shackle the press, and it’s hard to believe that Adams went to his grave believing he should in fact have signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Were the American press only the mainstream media not a single politician would ever even pine secretly for a return of the Sedition acts. In truth, the American people are not safe if the press is content simply to preserve its prerogatives.
You can watch the video of Logan, who is certainly not anywhere near the worst on this issue, at the link. It’s interesting that she speaks so highly of McChrystal, and bemoans the fate of this fine man. How many people in this country know that the man in charge in Afghanistan was complicit in the Pat Tillman cover-up, a fact he has admitted. Not just complicit, really, but the man most responsible. Logan surely knows, but it doesn’t seem to occur to her that perhaps that fact tells us something about the man. In any event, it’s a fact that should have been more widely known, something the insider press is much too unlikely to assure. After all, you can’t keep reminding the public of an uncomfortable fact about a man, if you are trying to preserve access to him or his flunkies. Rolling Stone did us a favor. If they can take down Petreaus, (who, unbelievably, is dubbed a “liberal favorite” by Howard Kurtz, the host of the show) they will really do the country a favor. Maybe if Obama runs out of generals he’ll get out of Afghanistan.
Prologue:
After I wrote this, but before I posted it, I watched last Wednesday’s Daily Show, which I hadn’t seen last week. Here’s Jon Stewart, who convincingly demonstrates that access is all that’s on their minds. By the way, if you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth watching for the Fox and Friends takedown near the end.