It’s been a pretty remarkable week, news-wise and media-wise, and to say the two are related would be an understatement. We’ve seen the lid finally blow off the long-simmering Al Gore sex scandal, which certainly serves to explain the otherwise mysterious Al Gore divorce. We’ve seen a group of alleged Russian spies, at least one journalist among them, rolled up by the FBI. We’ve seen the public revelation of the so-called “JournoList,” a listserv groupthink email chain compromising roughly 400 lefty journalists and bloggers, for which Andrew Breitbart has offered $100,000 for the complete contents. And we’ve seen yet another example of the revolving-door relationship between Democrat journalists and Democrat politics when a Washington Post blogger turned out to be an Obama Administration operative.
I think you know where we’re going with this.
Journalists — whether through action or inaction — are at the center of every one of these scandals. And the amazing thing is, they not only don’t care that they’ve lost the trust of the public, forfeited their claims of objectivity and destroyed the nature of the reporter-reader relationship — they’re proud of it!
The old Soviet Union used American journalists as willing accomplices: from John Reed to Walter Duranty to I.F. Stone, the Soviets knew that one path to the destruction of the Principal Enemy lay through the press, and they diligently pursued western reporters, dangling ideological solidarity, blackmail or money. Heck, Warren Beatty even made a movie about Reed:
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But the media need not be skulking spies pretending to the voice of the Little Guy — like that rancid hypocrite, Izzy Stone — in order to damage the nation. If for the triumph of evil all good men need to do is nothing, as Burke said, today’s partisans can bury or even block stories they’d prefer not to cover — such as, until recently, the Portland Tribune‘s decision not to cover a female massage therapist’s allegations of sexual abuse against the former Vice President of the United States, despite the existence of a police report. I began my career as a police reporter and, let me tell you, that would have been front-page news in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle back then.
The media can also celebrate its unilateral decision to cast off its previous protestations of neutrality and now openly take sides, with various media figures moving easily back and forth between Democrat administrations at the national and state levels, and then back to their day jobs. In the old days, the briefest stint as a p.r. person would prevent a writer from ever becoming a legitimate reporter — today, rank partisanship and policy advocacy is no barrier to hiring.
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That would be Ezra Klein in the video above, the former proprietor of the JournoList. A great deal of noise — squealing and yelping, really — has been made on the left, assuring the world that there was nothing at all sinister about Klein’s sewing circle, that it was really just a bunch of policy wonks sitting around swapping stories.
The Dave Weigel scandal, however, plainly gives the lie to that, revealing a frat-house, food-fight atmosphere among the emotional juveniles who regularly contributed to it, and no doubt even worse will emerge in the coming weeks as the urge to leak becomes irresistible and the list’s contents find their way into the public arena, as they should.
For the story is no longer about Weigel, who’s since gone on to greener pastures at MSNBC; the story is the list itself, and you’d think reporters all over America would be chasing that story down. For whether the JournoList was as sinister as the Right fears or an innocent as the Left claims, its very existence is troubling. For one thing, it’s certainly put paid to the notion of the fearless independent reporters of sainted memory, replacing it with that of the herd of independent minds. And while there have long been journalists’ societies, they were never limited to the ideological cool kids. If the Washington Post had any decency, it would fire Klein for casting the paper’s hard-won — and so easily dispersed — reputation for professional objectivity into question.
But of course the Post won’t, because it doesn’t. It’s as in-the-tank as anybody, an organization as devoted to protecting the interests of a company town as Variety is to Hollywood — especially if those interests align with their favored party, the Democrats.
So ignore all the shouting you hear about what a great thing the death of journalistic objectivity really is, mostly from people who never had any in the first place. As it’s done time and again, when the Left is caught with its pants down, it simply changes the rules of the game. When Clinton was caught up in the Lewinsky scandal, the media gatekeepers wondered what the big deal was because, after all, “everybody does it.”
Now the media has discovered that reporters have opinions (as if they didn’t before), so let’s cast off a noble if difficult ideal — to play the news straight — and give in. And while we’re at it, let’s take jobs with the current Administration, and let’s form a group of like-minded groupthinkers to privately discuss policy and then let’s advocate those policies in the pages of the Washington Post, and let’s even work both sides of the street simultaneously, writing for the Post and working in the White House. Is this a great racket or what?
Oh — and let’s not tell our readers.
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