Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics by Glenn Greenwald Page B
Authors: Glenn Greenwald
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extraordinary political fact over the last seven years is that the Bush administration has been free to pursue such blatantly radical and extremist policies as indefinite detention, torture, and illegal surveillance with barely a peep of protest. The nation remains in a war in Iraq that the vast majority of the country opposes and the Bush administration long threatened new wars against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the American citizenry. The alarming issue is not merely that the Republicans have succeeded in foisting upon this country such grossly destructive policies, ones that contravene every core political principle that has defined the United States for decades. It is that they have foisted them with so little critical analysis from our political and media elite.
But it is easy to see why this is so. These policies have become normalized, entirely mainstream, because our elite media does not see anything noteworthy or significant about them, let alone alarming or radical, and—with rare exceptions—they have no desire, and no ability, to take any of these stories on. They are interested in doing nothing other than repeating what they are told by their government sources, and hence that is what they do.
Rendition, warrantless eavesdropping, and expansive executive lawbreaking are just dreary, boring stories to pick at for political fodder when our media stars are forced—between gossipy sessions over Hillary’s coldness and Edwards’s gayness and the size of his house and the content of newspaper advertisements from MoveOn.org—to pay them any attention at all. The last thing they are interested in doing is alienating their secret, inside sources who feed them the prepackaged dirt by trying to expose any actual corruption or wrongdoing in our government. There is a cost to undertaking the latter; it takes work and energy. And our coddled media stars have no interest in endeavors entailing any of that.
That is why Kurtz and his colleagues view torture and NSA lawbreaking stories as the equivalent of what Digby calls “those delightfully bitchy tidbits” fed to them by right-wing dirtmongers. It is because most journalists treat them the same, except that they’re far more interested in the latter than the former. Matt Drudge rules their world.
One of Kurtz’s Washington Post colleagues, political reporter Shailagh Murray, is a blazing example of the media’s preference for spoon-fed filth over substantive issues. Murray embodies every decadent, petty, and rotted attribute of the Beltway journalist, enabling one to understand vividly how corrosive our political discourse is simply by observing her behavior.
When Lewis Libby, the top aide to Dick Cheney and one of President Bush’s top advisors, was convicted of multiple felonies in a federal court and sentenced (by a Bush-appointed federal judge) to almost three years in prison, George Bush intervened in the case and announced that he would commute Libby’s sentence to ensure that he never spent a day in jail. When asked during a Washington Post online chat about this extraordinary event, Murray—the national political reporter of the Washington Post— could barely contain her boredom. She strutted around in a posture of faux sophistication, declaring that she regarded the whole affair as merely “the Libby flap,” and that her reaction could be summed up in one word: “YAAWWN” [ sic ] .
That is the hallmark of most of the media elite’s reaction to any issues that actually matter—“YAAWWN.” And our political dialogue is thus awash in petty, adolescent gossip and smears that require little work—and even less thought—to churn out. Indeed, in November 2007, the media was obsessed for almost a full week with the story that one of the questioners at a Hillary Clinton campaign event had been “planted”—that is, told what to ask the candidate by a Clinton staffer. Murray unsurprisingly found this irrelevancy full of
But it is easy to see why this is so. These policies have become normalized, entirely mainstream, because our elite media does not see anything noteworthy or significant about them, let alone alarming or radical, and—with rare exceptions—they have no desire, and no ability, to take any of these stories on. They are interested in doing nothing other than repeating what they are told by their government sources, and hence that is what they do.
Rendition, warrantless eavesdropping, and expansive executive lawbreaking are just dreary, boring stories to pick at for political fodder when our media stars are forced—between gossipy sessions over Hillary’s coldness and Edwards’s gayness and the size of his house and the content of newspaper advertisements from MoveOn.org—to pay them any attention at all. The last thing they are interested in doing is alienating their secret, inside sources who feed them the prepackaged dirt by trying to expose any actual corruption or wrongdoing in our government. There is a cost to undertaking the latter; it takes work and energy. And our coddled media stars have no interest in endeavors entailing any of that.
That is why Kurtz and his colleagues view torture and NSA lawbreaking stories as the equivalent of what Digby calls “those delightfully bitchy tidbits” fed to them by right-wing dirtmongers. It is because most journalists treat them the same, except that they’re far more interested in the latter than the former. Matt Drudge rules their world.
One of Kurtz’s Washington Post colleagues, political reporter Shailagh Murray, is a blazing example of the media’s preference for spoon-fed filth over substantive issues. Murray embodies every decadent, petty, and rotted attribute of the Beltway journalist, enabling one to understand vividly how corrosive our political discourse is simply by observing her behavior.
When Lewis Libby, the top aide to Dick Cheney and one of President Bush’s top advisors, was convicted of multiple felonies in a federal court and sentenced (by a Bush-appointed federal judge) to almost three years in prison, George Bush intervened in the case and announced that he would commute Libby’s sentence to ensure that he never spent a day in jail. When asked during a Washington Post online chat about this extraordinary event, Murray—the national political reporter of the Washington Post— could barely contain her boredom. She strutted around in a posture of faux sophistication, declaring that she regarded the whole affair as merely “the Libby flap,” and that her reaction could be summed up in one word: “YAAWWN” [ sic ] .
That is the hallmark of most of the media elite’s reaction to any issues that actually matter—“YAAWWN.” And our political dialogue is thus awash in petty, adolescent gossip and smears that require little work—and even less thought—to churn out. Indeed, in November 2007, the media was obsessed for almost a full week with the story that one of the questioners at a Hillary Clinton campaign event had been “planted”—that is, told what to ask the candidate by a Clinton staffer. Murray unsurprisingly found this irrelevancy full of
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