We Weren’t Born Yesterday

** Updated below **

by digby

Josh Marshall writes about the Washington Press corps’ thin-skin today, saying:

There’s a lot on the web that it is crude, cruel, coarse, even hateful. And that’s without even taking Hugh Hewitt into account.

It’s certainly not for the faint of heart.

But when I hear this argument from journalists (or more often folks speaking on behalf of journalists) it’s freely conceded that little has changed in terms of criticism from the right. There was talk radio before the Internet, the various right-wing media watchdog outfits, Fox News, etc. What’s changed is that journalists now often feel besieged from the left as well. They’re getting from both sides. There’s nowhere to turn. (Believe me, I’ve had this conversation many times.

That’s exactly right and it’s exactly the point. I wrote about this a few months ago in response to Franklin Foer’s article in The New Republic in which he worried that the left was making a mistake in undermining the credibility of the mainstream press because it would ultimately be bad for the country:

Back when The NY Times was relentlessly flogging Whitewater, I agreed with Franklin Foer that it would be a bad idea to help discredit the mainstream press because their reputations would be so sullied that eventually they’d have no clout to protect sources and tell the truth.

I thought when the Washington Post took every self-serving leak from the Starr investigation and put it on the front page like it was VE Day that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to vilify their obvious slavishness to GOP operatives because it would be bad when we need the media to have credibility on other major issues.

I was angry about the fact that more than 60 newpapers, including the NY Times editorialized (“until the Starr investigation, ‘no citizen … could have grasped the completeness of President Clinton’s mendacity or the magnitude of his recklessness.'”) that Clinton should resign because of a personal indiscretion. But I didn’t rail against the press for jumping on this Republican manufactured bandwagon because I thought that it was important not to paint mainstream journalism with a broad brush just because they were being absurdly obtuse in this particular case.

When the media treated Al Gore like a circus clown and overlooked the fact that George W. Bush was a gibbering idiot (and admitted openly that they did it for fun) I held in my intemperate remarks because I thought it would harm the party in the long run if we attacked the press as the Republicans do. When they reported the election controversy as if it would create a constitutional crisis if the nation had to wait more than a month to find out whether they had the right president I kept my own counsel. After all, who would defend democracy when something truly serious happened?

After 9/11 when they helped the president promote the idea that the country was at “war” (with what we didn’t exactly know) I knew it was a terrible mistake and would lead to a distorted foreign policy and twisted domestic politics. But I didn’t blame the media because it was very difficult to fight that at the time. They’re human, after all.

And when they helped the government make their case for this misbegotten war in Iraq, I assumed that they knew what they were talking about. After all, I had been defending their credibility for years now, in spite of everything I’ve mentioned. If they would screw up something like this, then for what was I holding back my criticism? This was the most serious issue this country had faced in many a decade.

When no WMD were found and I was informed that the NY Times had assigned a neocon shill to report the story, and then defended her when she was implicated in a white house smear to cover up its lies going into Iraq, I no longer saw any need to defend them or any other mainstream media outlet who had rah-rahed the country into Iraq because of promises of embedded glory on the battlefield and in the ratings.

This is fifteen long years of watching the Times and the rest of the mainstream media buckle under the pressure of GOP accusations that they are biased, repeatedly take bogus GOP manufactured scandals and run with them like kids with a brand new kite, treat our elections like they are entertainment vehicles for bored reporters and generally kowtow to the Republican establishment as the path of least resistence. I waited for years for them to recognise what was happening and fight back for their own integrity. It didn’t happen. And I began to see that the only way to get the press to work properly was to apply equal pressure from the opposite direction. It’s a tug of war. They were not strong enough to resist being dragged off to the right all by themselves. They needed some flamethrowers from our side pulling in the opposite direction to make it possible for them to avoid being pulled all the way over.

So, it is with great respect and reverence for the press, which I consider to be indispensible to democracy, that I have become a rabid critic. It did this country no good to allow the Republicans to perpetuate their permanent “mau-mau the media” campaign for 25 years. And it does the press no good to be defended by liberals when they succumb to the mau-mauing. Indeed, history shows that their reaction is to lean even more closely to the GOP to show they are not liberal themselves.

I will no longer defend the press unconditionally. They have proved that they can’t resist the powerful pull of rightwing intimidation and seduction without some counterbalance on the left and I’m more than willing to call a spade a spade to do that. It has not served my politics or my country well to quietly support the media so that they could maintain crediblity. I honestly don’t see that we have anything more to lose when presidents are being impeached for trivial reasons, elections are being stolen and wars are being waged on lies. Just how bad would it have to get to justify criticizing the press for its complicity in those things?

Sorry to re-post my old stuff, but there’s a reason for it. Today, Mike McCurry, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary is a lobbyist (working for telco companies apparently) who wants the congress to reject the concept of net neutrality and he has gotten into a heated blog war over the issue, taking the blogosphere to task for, among other things, failing to stand up for the first amendment because we allegedly didn’t support journalists who were trying to expose the WMD lies.

I’m not sure what he’s going on about with that, but I can’t help but be a little saddened that McCurry is the guy writing this. Reading my piece, you can see that I was the staunchest of Clinton supporters when it came to the destructive, rightwing character assassination campaign. I saw it for what it was and had there been a blogosphere at the time I would have been fighting Drudge and the talk radio screamers and the screeching harpies with everything I had. Citizens around the country were radicalized when Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart had to appear every day before a prurient, sophomoric press corps who were slavering over details spoonfed to them by rightwing operatives for maximum tittilation and scandalous insinuation.

One of the most important catalysts for the emergence of a left online community was the Clinton and Gore character assassination campaigns. We just could not remain quiet anymore — particularly since the mainstream press seemed to writhe around in the muck with the same pleasure as the GOP operatives who plied them with tabloid trivia. The technology merely gave voice to what millions of us out here in Americaland had been screaming in our minds for years.

You’d think that Mike McCurry, of all people, would see that it is necessary to have some sort of counter balance to a sophisticated righwing noise machine that is powerful enough to co-opt the mainstream press and hijack the national agenda. Having watched the modern Republican party operate as I have for the past quarter century, I can guarantee you that should the Democrats assume power again, they are going to be subject to an even more outraged and wounded GOP attack operation than existed under Clinton. It is what they do and they do it well. After watching what went down during the Clinton and Bush years many of us quite rightly have no faith that the mainstream media will be able to resist either the lure or the indimidation of the GOP’s well oiled propaganda operation.

We will have the Democrats’ backs this time, whether the Washington insider establishment finds us distasteful or not. It’s our party, and our country, too.

Update: Haha. I see that Chris Bowers has accurately, in my view, characterized the beltway mentality about blogs as “adults vs teenagers,” which is funny considering the title I gave this post. At my age, being called a teen-ager is a compliment, although it’s hardly believable.

(Where have I heard crowing about how “the grown-ups are back in charge” recently? I seem to remember that didn’t work out so well. And pardon me for thinking that the late 90’s political establishment’s obsession with the taped girly confessionals of the youthful Monica was just a tad immature.)

But beyond all that, this is probably a fairly accurate analysis of how the blogosphere is perceived and those who believe it miss the point. I have been following politics for a long while and, believe it or not, by temperament I’m fairly low key. (Some might say I’m dead inside.) I was a fervent 70’s reformer and a strong anti-Reaganite, but even then I can’t say that I was particularly rabid in my beliefs. It was never my personal style to be a bombthrower.

I suspect that many others who are engaged in the netroots like me became radicalized in their 30’s and 40’s by a Republican Party that started to behave as an openly undemocratic institution. Why so many of these establishment Democrats and insider press corps aren’t exercised by this after what we’ve seen, I can’t imagine. Perhaps they just can’t see the forest for the trees. This past decade has not been business as usual.

History has many examples of societies that enabled radical political factions to dominate, through inertia, cynicism or plain intimidation. It happened in Europe in the 25 years before I was born and almost destroyed the whole planet. I know it’s unfashionably hysterical to be concerned about such things, but I have never believed that America was so “exceptional” that it couldn’t happen here.

The stakes are incredibly high. Without the cold war polarity, the US has bigger responsibilities than ever. And instead of behaving like a mature democracy and world leader, we have been alternating from adolescent tabloid obsessives to playground bullies. This is serious business.

The center-left blogosphere may sound overwrought, but in fact it is a rational, clear-headed response to what has been happening — and continues to happen as this country’s political establishemt fiddles and fulminates about civility.

Update II: Atrios is absolutely right that this new paradigm means that contra whatever nonsense McCurry is on about with respect to WMD’s, we will always support accurate reporting.

I’ve got to say, though, that in the Clinton years I could count the reporters on one hand who actually did that. Waas, Lyons, Conason and maybe a few more. The rest were like a pack of 12 year old girls at an N Sync concert.

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