Saturday Sermon: The True Role of the Traditional Media

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/23/prosecutions/index.ht…

It's one thing to be a stenographer--and a bad one at that. But, as Glenn Greenwald notes, our celebrity press corps goes beyond that:

...the favorite mantra of media stars and Beltway mavens everywhere -- Look Forward, Not Backwards -- is nothing but a plea that extreme government crimes remain concealed and unexamined.

This remains the single most notable and revealing fact of American political life: that (with some very important exceptions) those most devoted to maintaining and advocating government secrecy is our journalist class, of all people. It would be as if the leading proponents of cigarette smoking were physicians, or those most vocally touting the virtues of illiteracy were school teachers. Nothing proves the true function of these media stars as government spokespeople more than their eagerness to shield government actions from examination and demand that government criminality not be punished.

....The OLC memos that were released last week reflect a deeply corrupted, criminal and morally depraved political class (see this video clip for a strangely affecting demonstration of that fact...), but our media stars are a vital reason why that has happened. It cannot be overstated the extent to which they are nothing but appendages of, servants to, political power (as one Twitter commentator said today about this painfully vapid video from the painfully vapid David Gregory: when media stars say "my reporting," what they usually mean is: "this is what I was told to repeat"). These three media rules repeatedly shape how they talk about government actions, and these rules are particularly pronounced as the establishment media now is finally forced to discuss what to do about the fact that our highest political leaders repeatedly broke our most serious laws.

The best way to clean up our political system would be to fire every journalist and politician who apologized for or aided and abetted torture. They are so deeply invested in something so foul and corrupting they can't be reformed--they need to be moved aside.