We are ruled, entertained, and informed by the new courtiers. Congressional Democrats, like the Republicans, are mostly courtiers. Our pundits and experts, at least those with prominent public platforms, are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly and systematically stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception.
Television journalism is largely a farce. Celebrity reporters, masquerading as journalists, make millions a year and do little more than provide a platform for the powerful and the famous so they can spin, equivocate, and lie. Sitting in a studio, putting on makeup, and chatting with Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, or Lawrence Summers has little to do with real journalism. If you are a journalist, you should start to worry if you make $5 million a year. No real journalist has a comfortable, cozy relationship with the powerful. No real journalist believes that serving the powerful is a primary part of his or her calling. Those in power fear and dislike real journalists -- and they should. Ask Amy Goodman, Seymour Hersh, Walter Pincus, Robert Scheer, or David Cay Johnston.
The comedian Jon Stewart, who hosts his popular "Daily Show' on Comedy Central, has become one of the most visible and influential media figures in America. In an interview with Jim Cramer, who hosts a show called Mad Money on CNBC, Stewart asked his guest why, during all the years he advised viewers about investments, he never questioned the mendacious claims from CEOs and banks that unleashed the financial meltdown -- or warned viewers about the shady tactics of short-term selling and massive debt leveraging used to make fortunes for CEOs out of the retirement and savings accounts of ordinary Americans.
Cramer, like most television and many print reporters, provides an uncritical forum to the powerful. At the same time they provide the forum, they pretend they have vetted and investigated the claims made by those in power. They play the role on television of journalists. It is a corrupt kind of quid pro quo: The media get access to the elite as long as the media courtiers faithfully report what the elite wants reported. Without that quid pro quo, reporters are cast into the wilderness and denied access.
The behavior of a Jim Cramer, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in an article on Salon.com, mirrors that of the "courtiers" who covered the lead-up to the war in Iraq. Day after day, news organizations as diverse as the New York Times, CNN, and the three major television networks amplified lies fed to them by the elite as if they were facts. While they pretended to serve the public, they actually served the power elite, just as Cramer and most of those on television do today.
In Bill Moyers' 2007 PBS documentary Buying the War, Moyers asked Meet the Press host Tim Russert why he had passed on these lies without vetting them. Even more damaging, Moyers contrasted Russert's work with that of Bob Simon of CBS, who had made a few phone calls and had quickly learned that the administration's pro-war leaks, so crucial in fanning public and political support for going to war, were bogus. Moyers focused on a story, given to the New York Times by Vice President Dick Cheney's office, that appeared on the front page of the paper the Sunday morning the vice president was also a guest on Meet the Press, where Cheney had the audacity to cite the Times article to substantiate what he was telling Tim Russert!
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post suggested that Russert's journalistic failure, in allowing these lies to pass, unvetted, indicated a larger failure of many media figures: "More and more, in the media, become, I think, common carriers of administration statements, rather than critics of the administration. We've sort of given up being independent and on our own."
Russert, like Cramer, when exposed as complicit in the dissemination of misinformation, attempted to portray himself as an innocent victim, as did New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who, along with her colleague Michael Gordon, worked largely as stenographers for the Bush White House during the propaganda campaign to invade Iraq. Once the administration claims justifying the war had been exposed as falsehoods, Miller quipped that she was "only as good as my sources." This logic upends the traditional role of reporting, which should always begin with the assumption that those in power have an agenda and are rarely bound to the truth. All governments lie, as I. F. Stone pointed out, and it is the job of any real journalist to do the hard, tedious work necessary to expose these lies. On the other hand, it is the relatively easy and well paid job of courtiers to feed off the scraps and BS tossed to them by the powerful so that they can best serve the interests of the power elite that pays them so well.
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