So, recent events got me thinking again. The movie "Good Night and Good Luck" lionizes (some say hagiographs) Edward R. Murrow. At the same time, the Valerie Plame/Judith Miller/Republican scumbags case kept its revelations going. Now, one of the problems with the debate on Plame and Judith Miller, the reporter who supposedly was leaked her name by Scooter Libby, is that no one wants to come out and say that she is just another Report-whore of the modern style, not a freedom fighter for the First Amendment (though, I suppose, the Fifth Amendment may come into play for her at some time soon …)
Yes, there has been a steady downslide in the image of reporters in the past few years. Of course there have always been the celebrity Report-whores, selling stories about the stars for money. We have seen the spectacle of formerly 'hard' journalists like Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters now paving their way on morning pseudo-news chat shows sitting on a couch talking about celebrity boob jobs. Report-whoring was made easier by the Fox network, who have funded an entire stable of Report-whores whose idea of hard news reporting is rephrasing White House press releases. But now, we are faced with the idea of a semi-permanent set of Report-whores whose accept their role is to push government propaganda with the same zeal as have celebrity reporters pimping new studio releases.
Liberals must be especially aghast at Miller. But, why are we now surprised? Partially because Miller works for the liberal bastion "The New York Times". A traitor in our midst? No, more like the token conservative at that paper, or at least so we thought. But is she the only sellout? Far from it. Just as we ask that question we get the spectacle of Mr. Bob Woodward, supposed Hero of the '72 Revolution. Woodward now admits he had contact with the Bush administration but failed to mention it as he 'didn't want to get involved' in the Plame case. Hard hitting? Only as he hit the bottom of his foxhole diving for cover. Surprised? A documentary of Watergate, Silent Coup, points out that Woodward was always a mole for the military intelligence community, being a briefer for naval intelligence. Since Watergate he has been a liberal paper tiger, mostly pimping his credentials writing supposedly hard hitting books with all the punch of a feather boa. But now, he whored out to the Rove-Cheney machine. How could we have been so naïve?
Back to "Good Night", though. Sadly, it points up to me that Murrow, Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley and the like that I grew up with were all the exception, not the rule. The rule of American media history has been the corporate press, from the Federalist press machine of the 1780s, the Republican press of the Civil War to the Hearst tabloids.
What changed our perceptions was the Second World War. But, that was obviously more the exception than the rule. As the Greatest Generation ™ dies off, the next generations will find that the real problem is evermore rampant corporatism. And the only time in recent memory that corporations were at all brought to heel was when they were all but nationalized to fight WW2. Since then we have had increasing corporate sponsorship of war until the present day when the military-industrial complex of Eisenhower's warning pales by comparison to Bush's creation of a war not only sponsored by but outsourced to industry. The Report-whores who mildly complained at being somewhat shut out of the first gulf war were this time herded completely by the Rove-Cheney machine. All they wanted was the promise that they could be the next Wolf Blitzer, filming with the bombs falling around them. Be careful what you ask for, Report-whores. This time, the bombs are roadside and they don't make nice TV when they blow up your humvee.
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