When We Try to Explain the Rout of the Press under George W. Bush...

When We Try to Explain the Rout of the Press under George W. Bush
A few factors that tend to get overlooked...


Glenn Greenwald wrote a post at Salon last weekend about the “reverence for Karl Rove” among Washington journalists. He mentions my August 14th entry, Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press, in which I try to explain that savviness—“that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, ‘with it,’ and unsentimental in all things political”—is the real ideology in Beltway journalism. Rove, I said, “understood and exploited for political gain” this cult of savviness in our press corps.

Glenn’s point of departure is a recent column by Gloria Borger of US News that deserves our derision because it is nothing but horse race fluff. The column also shows undue reverence for Karl Rove’s political acumen. “When Rove speaks, the political class pays attention—usually with good reason,” she writes. Greenwald observes that “nothing Borger says is ever unique or original,” which is true. Like a lot of pundits who appear on pundit shows, Gloria Borger is an interchangeable part.

“She is merely channelling the deep admiration which her Beltway media colleagues have long harbored for Rove and his underlings,” says Greenwald. Admiration seems to him a pretty good explantion for things:

The media virtually never takes seriously any administration lawbreaking and corruption scandals because the people at the center of those scandals are those whom they deeply admire. They do not want political operatives whom they admire to be investigated, let alone prosecuted. They do not subject White House claims to scrutiny because they hear those claims from operatives with whom they identify and for whom they have deep affection. And they adopt GOP-fed narratives and blindly recite them because they are convinced that those who feed them those claims are individuals who possess the greatest insight.

I agree that the people in the press admire Karl Rove and wish they knew as much about politics as they believe he does. But I would recommend to Glenn some other factors that deserve consideration if we’re trying to explain the collapse of the press under Bush, Cheney and Rove.

The most important of these is that journalists and their methods were overwhelmed by what the Bush White House did— by its radicalism. (The subject of another Greenwald post today.) There is simply nothing in the Beltway journalist’s rule book about what to do when a group of people comes to power willing to go as far as this group has in expanding executive power, eluding oversight, steamrolling critics (even when they are allies) politicizing the government, re-interpreting the Constitution, rolling back the press, making secrecy and opacity standard operating procedure, and repealing the very principle of empiricism in matters of state. That’s not an excuse for what happened, but I think it does help explain why the press got beat so badly.

more...

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2007/09/04/grnwl_rove.html

considered important.