Re: Below

Once again, Atrios has a link to someone who made the point better than me, alas. Still, I'm glad the theme is being picked up on.

From Steve Gilliard:

The media in America lives in a dual world, one where they want to hold people accountable, yet flip out when people do the same to them.

Atrios's reporting on the AP's Nedra Pickler, led to a nasty letter from the AP's legal counsel about harassment to one of the people who wrote to complain about her reporting, which promptly got a sneering reply. Journalists have amazingly thin skins when they are criticized in any way, shape or form. Anyone who writes media criticism can make a bunch of enemies really quickly by writing about their peers. There are people at Salon who still hate the fact that I looked at the 10Q's (quarterly financial reports) and showed them to be woefully managed.

I think it would be a really, really good idea to track reporters, word for word, broadcast for broadcast, and print the results online. Not just for any one campaign or cause, but to track people's reporting the way we track other services. If someone had bothered to question the reporting om Wen Ho Lee, he might not have been accused of espionage falsely by the New York Times. If someone had actually checked Jayson Blair's work, the Times might have fired his ass years earlier.

And let's give credit to Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler for continuing to point this stuff out.

BigLeftOutside is another website that rightly gives pundit-lackey journalism the treatment it deserves on a regular basis. Giordano has gone so far as to assert that the candidate who runs against THE MEDIA might find it a winning issue in this election cycle:

But I think that Dean has stumbled upon the first issue of the campaign that could win him the general election: Run against the media!

Drudge posts the transcript of Dean's exchange on the matter with Matthews, which shows that Matthews really pulled Dean onto the terrain of the big media monopoly issue. The transcript suggests that Dean kind of fell into the issue as part of his (poorly worded) "re-regulation" platform.

On the other hand, if Dean starts sounding less like a bureaucrat, and more like Teddy Roosevelt or Huey Long on matters like Big Media and the corporate coup over a system formerly known as American Democracy, he could turn the country's political map upside-down, inside-out, and win the general election.

I'm inclined to agree. There is a general distrust of the media these days, even if this distrust runs the gamut of the political spectrum. However, this might be one way to either break the media cycle of lackeydom, or at least get a different set of lackeys reporting the news. If the former occurred, great, if the latter--well, at least there would be a small breakdown in the present habit of REWARDING sniveling, whining, syncophants.