Who’s The Boss?

by digby

Roy at Alicublog made me depressed. I guess we citizen journalists aren’t taking over the planet next February as planned. Damn. There was supposed to be money in it.

In the course of bursting my little bubble, he mentions a New Yorker profile(pdf) of Hugh Hewitt written by Nicholas Lemann, well known journalist and current Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. I missed this article when it came out and couldn’t quite believe what I was reading.

Hugh Hewitt is a hardworking, intelligent entrepreneur and a fine cigar smoking gentleman and scholar to boot. Not that he’ll get any credit for it:

I can competetently predict is that after this article appears activists on the left will put Hugh Hewitt forward as an example of the well-oiled quality of the Republican media operation, because of the efficiency and prolixity of his efforts to disseminate the party’s message. If bloggers can respond to political developments within seconds, it must be OK for me to speen up the cycle of discourse just one more click and defend Hewitt in advance against this as yet unmade charge. Hewitt is definitely a Republican, but he is no mere mouthpiece. He says that he has spent a total of five minutes off the air with Karl Rove(to disagree with a possible change in the tax treatment for clerics), that he never reads the e-mails that endlessly flow from the Republican National Committee, and that he is now involved, through an outfit called Not One Dime More, in a campaign to dissuade people from contributing to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (because some of its candidates supported the filibuster compromise.) What Hewitt demonstrates about journalism is that journalism-as-politics is rapidly expanding its size and reach, especially on the conservative side. What he demonstrates about politics is not that the Republicans have a wonderously efficient message machine but that there are a lot of smart and very determined conservatives who are starting up new organizations and signing up more converts. And the Democrats aren’t going to beat them by streamlining the delivery of their message.

Ok, I don’t even know what “streamlining the delivery of their message” would entail and Lemann doesn’t explain anywhere in the article so I have no idea what he’s talking about. But his misunderstanding of the way the Right Wing Noise Machine really works is astonishing.

Guys like Hewitt don’t dance to the Ken Mehlman’s tune; if anything, it’s the other way around. The RWNM is a subsidiary of the big money conservative movement not the Republican party. In fact, the Republican party itself is just the political arm of the big money conservative movement.

All those “smart, determined conservatives” who are starting new organizations and making more converts are funded by a network of wealthy benefactors. They are not required to make money (I guess they are considered the loss leaders of the oligarchy) and their function is to simultaneously write the word and spread it. They’ve been fairly successful recently at making a market for their work, but it’s still not big enough to sustain it. With the exception of actual political campaigns (at which point they actively coordinate with whichever strategic electoral wizard they’ve anointed), after 30 years of listening only to each other there is no need to explicitly inform anyone of the company line. They know it without having to be told.

I suppose you could call that “journalism.” I call it “propaganda” and I’m stunned that Nicholas Lemann, of all people, hasn’t figured out how this thing works by now. But when you hear some of Hewitt’s interviews with DC journalists it’s clear they haven’t figured it out either.

Update: Andrew Sullivan has been having an ongoing feud with Hewitt. As it happens, as part of an argument about Mel Gibson, of all things, Hewitt makes my point for me today:

I am a defender of the president, though not when I think he or his Adminstration makes an error like the ports deal or the briefs in the Michigan affirmative action cases. Sullivan’s frenzied, sometimes even hysterical attacks on pundits and analysts who admire the president and his team are the means to understanding Sullivan. He is consumed by Bush hatred. So much so, in fact, that he has branched out into hating those who not only don’t hate Bush, but admire him.

I do believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Gonzales and Ashcroft have run the global war on terror about as well as it could have been run, and their commitment to its prosecution has been unyielding. I admire their courage and their consistency. This presidency is already among the most significant of our nation’s history, and like Reagan’s, will be admired for generations long after the Bush haters have been forgotten.

It stands to reason that he’s going to be the keeper of the Bush flame. Somebody has to do it and he is, after all, the man who made his bones working as Nixon’s assistant after his disgrace. I guess he got the short straw at the Wednesday meeting.

But let’s not forget that just because Hewitt says he’s a free thinker, it means he is. He has been in the tank so long he doesn’t even know how much internalized rightwing propaganda is splashing around in his brain.

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