Media Industrial Complex

by dday

Turns out Ron Fournier, now heading the Washington bureau of the AP right into ruin, had another job offer on the table prior to that:

In October 2006, the McCain team approached Fournier about joining the fledgling operation, according to a source with knowledge of the talks. In the months that followed, said a source, Fournier spoke about the job possibility with members of McCain’s inner circle, including political aides Mark Salter, John Weaver and Rick Davis.

Salter, who remains a top McCain adviser, said in an e-mail to Politico that Fournier was considered for “a senior advisory role” in communications.

“He did us the courtesy of considering the offer before politely declining it,” Salter said.

Why would he take it? He gets the free Dunkin’ Donuts for McCain anyway, which I assume would have been part of his job description.

Fournier is clearly a partisan cheerleader (“Keep up the fight!”) masquerading as a journalist. But am I supposed to be shocked by this? The late White House press secretary Tony Snow worked for Fox News prior to his arrival. The National Journal’s Linda Douglass is on the Obama campaign. There’s an endless revolving door between media and the corridors of power, and it’s been true since Bill Moyers and even before. That’s kind of a separate case, but my point is this: When I talk about the failures of the media, there’s no real discernment between it and the failures of a cloistered, insulated establishment. Because they amount to the same thing.

What’s far more disturbing is that these cozy establishment relationships lead insiders to expect to get away with contradictions while maintaining their perceived honorable reputation – which happens a lot on the McCain campaign:

A while back the McCain put a new rule in place that no one involved in their campaign could be a federal lobbyist or foreign agent. But CBS has an interview out with McCain campaign manager Rick Davis that appears to say that rule is no longer in effect. Asked how many lobbyists work on the campaign, Davis tells Katie Couric: “We don’t make it a litmus test for employment at the McCain campaign.”

THIS is the problem. The laziness, the willingness to be fed information for access, the inability to challenge any official statements or make a judgment on the side of truth or even remember what is being said from one day to the next. Fournier is not a problem, he’s just a symptom.

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