The Press and the visual media personalities are made up of flesh and blood people like you and me, with families to support.Financial security in that business is hard to come by.Even harder is achieving superstar status like the Rathers, Jenningses and Brokaws. The people at the bottom rung of the ladder have aspirations of living like the sueperstars in the business and know that saying anything that is not acceptable to the powers that be can mean an abrupt end to their career aspirations. The limiting boundaries of discourse are set by the holders of the purse strings.That means people who are supporters of George Bush and Cheney.
In this situation what would a prudent Press person do? Yes, he would watch what he says.He would be reluctant to cast the power elite in a bad light.In essence, he would become a cheerleader even if he does not want to be one.
While this financial imperatives of the people who toil in the Press rooms is one aspect of the servility problem,it is by no means the end of the story. The dirty secret of the business is that no one in our Press has the vaguest idea of what historic sense is in the same way one came to expect it from a Bill Shirer or a Harrison Salisbury.As a replacement these people become scavengers at the doors of the powerful, seeking access to “information” so they can write reams about nothing quoting “Senior Administration Officials” or a “highly placed source” in the administration or variants thereof. That access journalism has become a staple and allows men like Rove to manipulate what gets into the papers or the TV screens.Thus we have the inanities of Elisabeth Bumiller talking about what is on Bush’s iPod or any number of giggling kewpie dolls on TV screens whose attention spans rival that of teenage kids.
In this atmosphere, it should come as no shock that Matt Cooper of TIME sends an eMail to his editor claiming he has landed an interview with Rove on “double supersecret background” in tones that betray that same juvenile excitement I mentioned above.
Even when the disclosure Rove made about Valerie Plame was clearly a breach of national security, a fact that any high schooler would have instantly grasped, the Coopers and Millers appear to have been oblivious to it because they want to be seen as a friend of the powerful.
So, yes, our Press is servile;because of financial exigencies, the ambitions of the wannabes to live in Cape Cod or the Hamptons and their own intellectual laziness and moral vacancy.Cannot expect it to change under the present system.It would be hard for our current system to tolerate a Jimmy Breslin.
The only hope for us is the internet.As Mao famously said” Let a thousand flowers bloom” on the internet, of course.