Believe it or not, there was a time before blogging existed. It was called the 1990’s and Bill Clinton was our president. In that era, the mainstream press debated whether or not Bill Clinton had one of his closest friends whacked and whether or not Bill Clinton was a rapist. They also debated whether he was a crook because of some land deal in Arkansas that happened back in an even darker era.
It took me a long time to understand that there was absolutely no merit to any of these allegations because I naively thought that the media was somewhat responsible. If the New York Times said there was something fishy about Whitewater, I assumed that there was something fishy. After all, wasn’t The Times a left-leaning paper? Silly me.
The scales fell from my eyes at a rather momentous moment in history. It was the day that Kenneth Starr gave his report to the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment panel. From the November 20, 1998 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Lexis):
In a 58-page opening statement delivered to committee members Wednesday night — a copy of which was obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette — Starr offers not only a recap of the grounds for impeachment outlined in his referral to Congress but also provides an overview of his wide-ranging, four-year Whitewater investigation.
Included in the comments he plans to present during today’s nationally televised hearings are new details about some of the old subjects he has been investigating that strike back to the heart of the failed Marion County, Ark., land deal.
For the first time, Starr will acknowledge that his investigation has failed to turn up enough evidence to accuse the president of criminal wrongdoing in Whitewater, the firing of the White House travel office staff or the handling of FBI files by White House officials.
It was all, all of it, a load of crap. This was, for me, the first real indication that there is something desperately wrong with the mainstream media. It prepared me for the later repeat performance over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.
As Digby and Greenwald make pains to explain, the Beltway Insider Punditocracy (aka, the cocktail frankfurter set) has a different sensibility from the rest of the country, and their Dean, David Broder, is certainly no ‘voice of the people’. But it is actually worse than that.
What are we to make of a media that can totally freak out over extramarital fellatio, and pursue groundless claims of rape, murder, and crookedness against a Democratic president, but get grumpy when a special prosecutor pursues the Iran-Contra affair, Gary Webb pursues allegations of Contra cocaine trafficking, Patrick Fitzgerald prosecutes perjury and obstruction of justice, or congressional Democrats do basic oversight?
How can lying about a blow job compare to the snow-job that Colin Powell presented to the United Nations over Iraq’s WMD programs? There’s a reason people say, ‘When Clinton lied, no one died.’ It’s because it is an important distinction. Most of the country understands the distinction, but the cocktail frankfurter set does not.
And, moving away from the media to the social milieu in which they live, what are we to make of the following comment that was captured in Sally Quinn’s now infamous November 2, 1998 column, In Washington, That Let Down Feeling? Is there no sense of irony within the Beltway?
“People felt a reverent attitude toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” says Tish Baldrige, who once worked there as Jacqueline Kennedy’s social secretary and has been a frequent visitor since. “Now it’s gone, now it’s sleaze and dirt. We all feel terribly let down. It’s very emotional. We want there to be standards. We’re used to standards. When you think back to other presidents, they all had a lot of class. That’s nonexistent now. It’s sad for people in the White House. . . . I’ve never seen such bad morale in my life. They’re not proud of their chief.”
Did Tish Baldrige forget that JFK was cheating on Jacqueline Kennedy all throughout their marriage, including during his time in the Oval Office? Did she not realize that the main reason JFK was considered classy while Clinton was considered trashy is that the media declined to make an issue out of Kennedy’s roving eye? I can’t quite picture Walter Cronkite doing an interview with Kathleen Willey or Juanita Broderick.
Inside Washington DC, it is okay to lie your way into a war, even if you get caught, and its okay to cheat on the first lady…but not if you get caught. Go figure. And somehow these people are supposed to share the values of the American people.
The people of Washington DC are rarely popular outside the confines of the Beltway. But we are in different times. The Establishment has let us down. The media shares the blame. The New York Times let us down by allowing Judith Miller and William Safire to help the vice-president lie us into a disastrous war. The Washington Post editorialized for the war. Time and Newsweek columnists dropped the ball. The cable news pundits were cheerleaders. They didn’t reflect the will of the American people, they helped shape the consent of the American people by spreading fear and lies.
And if you want to understand the growth of the blogosphere, you have to understand it within this context. A lot of people knew better. A lot of people were skeptical…even cynical, about what the media was saying. And those people turned out to be right. And those people were just average everyday Americans that are much more reflective of the ‘voice of the people’ than David Broder will ever be. This explains something that is confusing Jonathan Alter:
There’s one dimension of the blogosphere that never ceases to amaze me: Some people disbelieve nearly everything they read in the “mainstream media” — and believe nearly everything they read online.
People are somewhat credulous by nature, but the simple explanation for this is that bloggers have a better record of being right than the mainstream media has had going back to Whitewater days.
