Some Further Comments on the News

Billmon on the MSM, with special reference to the WaPo/Baby Ben debacle:

Who knows? Who cares? Not me. But the larger issue here is what the Domenech fiasco tells us about the rapid ingestion of the conservative blogosphere into the belly of the big bad MSM.

A couple of years ago, I published an op-ed in the LA Times on the Selling of the Blogosphere -- for which I received an enormous amount of shit, much of it from bloggers (such as Michelle Malkin) who were most aggressively peddling their talents, such as they are, in the media marketplace, even as they decried the influence of the evil MSM.

After reading his comments, I'm more convinced than ever that my original take, in my comments on Al Gore a couple of days ago, was correct:

One thing that the debate over the "role of journalism" in contemporary political discourse has missed is that the major media outlets are no longer "journalists." They are major corporations, and their goals and philosophies are those of major corporations. Their newspapers and broadcasts are bottom-line driven, and the bias is going to be toward those politicians who will satisfy their needs as corporations.

Like any corporation, they are looking for new product, and blogging is, among certain elements, at least, the latest thing. And, like any arm of the establishment, they will coopt whatever will give them entree into a new market. (Look what happened to the gay liberation movement, $6 billion in disposable income later.)

Back to Billmon:

Maybe pasty-faced Young Republicans in bow ties really are the new black. But it feels a lot more calculated and cynical, not to mention mutually exploitative. The liberal mavens who feted Angela Davis and Huey Newton were powerful -- or at least privileged -- people who felt vaguely guilty about being powerful and privileged. The corporate suits now opening the journalistic doors to the propagandists of the authoritarian right are powerful and privileged people who hope that appeasing the blogswarm will help them remain powerful and privileged -- or at least avoid the fate of Eason Jordan and Dan Rather. This, as I (and many others) have already noted, bears a striking resemblance to a successful protection racket.

And in a way, that's what the current incarnation of Eisenhower's "military/industrial complex" is -- a corporate/government mutual protection racket.

Part of the whole phenomenon is that the driving paradigm in the twentieth century has been economics -- even Edward O. Wilson, in Sociobiology, casts his arguments in terms of the economics of genetic inheritance. The irony here is that, even in neotheocon America, we are all, one way or another, Marxists, whether we follow Marxist philosophy or not, because the basic structure of the argument is Marxist. The further irony is that the Marxist paradigm fits so neatly into the bourgeois world view (or perhaps vice-versa): it's all about the money.

Which, of course, leaves journalistic ethics high and dry:

The Post, it seems, isn't so far gone it's willing to ride out the storm with a redbaiter who's also a serial plagiarist. But the obvious reluctance of the paper and its editorial minions to face the facts, either before or after hiring Baby Ben, is rather telling -- as is the absurdity of their lies:

". . . We obviously did plenty of background checks" on Domenech, Brady said . . . .Plagiarism, though, is not an easy thing to spot, Brady suggested.

So hard, in fact, it took a few left-wing bloggers three whole days to come up with about twenty zillion examples of it. (Note to Jim Brady: Google. Check it out.) .

Or, for that matter, ethics of any sort. Look at Congress. Now that its fifteen minutes of fame are over, ethics reform in Congress is definitely a red-headed stepchild. (Not that I have anything against red-heads. Quite the opposite.)

And I think this comment by Billmon is telling:

The point is that when it came to Ben Domenech, the Post tried desperately to handle the situation with kid gloves -- even though the paper's own editorial credibility, as opposed to its hiring judgment -- was never on the line. One suspects that if the sins of a Janet Cook or a Jayson Blair had been exposed so quickly, they would have vanished without a trace within minutes. But of course, they weren't former political appointees who had powerful friends (and Daddies) in high places. (emphasis mine)

Ah, yes -- the MSM/Bush White House connection. Don't leave home without it.

The whole Ben Domenech/WaPo flap is the MSM in a nutshell: the news media no longer even pretend to be in the business of reporting and analyzing current events; they are in the business of currying and maintaining influence. They should, perhaps, think about how they became influential in the first place.

Maybe that would help.