Obama and the Establishment press, Week 13

One writer I don't quote nearly enough is Robert Perry of ConsortiumNews.com. In US News Media Fails America, Again 04/13/09, he lays out a brief history of how our Establishment media got to the point they did. There are so many major problems with our press no moderate-length article could possibly do justice to them. But this is a worthwhile overview. I found it especially useful in describing how the Republicans (he calls them "the Right", which is not strictly the same) managed to get such a Republican-friendly viewpoint so thoroughly embedded in our mass media.

Eric Boehlert points out how FOX News is reinventing itself as a loudspeaker for the "Patriot militia" far right and more actively mainstreaming crackpot extremist ideas in his Media Matters column of 04/16/09, Fox News' militia media: mainstreaming the fringe:

But let's take a step back and see just how extraordinary Fox News' latest lurch to the revolutionary right really is. And let's clearly understand how Fox News is actively trying to mainstream fringe allegations, how Murdoch's outlet functions as a crucial bridge -- a transmitter -- between the radical and the everyday.

What Fox News, and specifically Beck, is doing in early 2009 is giving a voice -- a national platform -- to the same deranged, hard-core haters who hounded the new, young Democratic president in the early 1990s in the wake of Waco (i.e. the Clinton Chronicles crowd). What Fox News is doing today is embracing the same kind of hate rhetoric and doomsday conspiratorial talk that flourished during the '90s, and Fox News is now dumping all that rancid stuff into the mainstream. It's legitimizing accusatory hate speech in a way no other television outlet in America ever has before.

Today's unhinged, militia-flavored attacks from the right against Obama are clearly reminiscent of 1993 and 1994 and the kind of tribal reaction conservatives had to the Democratic White House. What's different this time around is that that it's being adopted and broadcast nationally by Fox News, as it proudly mainstreams and validates the fringe.

For the past week, less significant than the continuing fanaticism and dishonesty of FOX News was the miserable failure of the Establishment press to deal adequately with the implications of the release of the latest torture memos. I've been posting about this already. George Stephanopoulos showed the frivolous attitude of the Beltway Villag toward the crime of torture in his weekend interview with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. He waited unto the very end of his segment with Rahm to bring it up, and introduced his question as, "Final quick question." The PBS Newshour put on a shameful display of what passes for "quality journalism" on the torture story this past Friday. The Newshour did much better in a news segment on Monday. But that Friday Political Wrap is a showpiece example of the problems afflicting our national press corps.

The bankruptcy of our press corps on this issue is breathtaking. In terms of restoring the rule of law and maintaining Constitutional democracy, it's probably even more serious than the bankruptcy of major financial institutions.

Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press