Scared

by tristero

A strange thought occured to me as I was reading this description of the early coverage of the Bush administration by Jay Rosen:

…journalists and their methods were overwhelmed by what the Bush White House did — by its radicalism. There is simply nothing in the Beltway journalist’s rule book about what to do, how to act, when a group of people comes to power willing to go as far as this group has in expanding executive power, eluding oversight, steamrolling critics (even when they are allies) politicizing the government, re-working the Constitution, rolling back the press, making secrecy and opacity standard operating procedure, and repealing the very principle of empiricism in matters of state.

The press tends to behave because it does not know how to act, in the sense of striking out in a new direction when confronted with a new fact pattern.

Many of us noticed this a long time ago and it is exactly right. In responding to this passage, Glenn Greenwald essentially says, yes, that was true but now we all now exactly what Bushism is, and still nothing gets done.

Good point. And not only is it infuriating, it’s deeply puzzling. We bloggers and commenters have hashed over numerous reasons for this – they’re cowards, their secret Bushites, they’re part of a hermetically sealed Village cut off from anyone’s opinions but their own, the agenda of the corporate press, even they’re worried about precipitating a constitutional crisis with an administration that will never do what Nixon did and resign. And I think there is much truth to all of this. I’d like to suggest one more possible reason. It’s bizarre, I admit, but even so, I can’t entirely dismiss it.

I suspect that many in the media are not so much cowards but scared, really scared. And I don’t mean scared for their careers, although they all saw what happened to Dan Rather and they’re scared about that too. No, what I mean is they’re physically scared.

Not necessarily of the Bush administration – but after all, they do arrest people without showing legal cause and they do torture people, and a few have died from their torture – but of the enormous amount of hatred the extreme right propaganda has stirred up.

Being scared for your life would certainly explain a lot of the reasons why reporters and their bosses seem so astoundingly incapable at connecting the dots the rest of us see. Just a weird thought.

Special Note to the right-wing and other cognitively-impaired individuals: I am not suggesting that it is rational for any media figure to believe that the Bush administration would whisk them away to Bulgaria for waterboarding. I am suggesting that they may be scared – somewhat rationally – of crazies who have been stirred to violence by elimationist rightwing propaganda. And they may be scared – quite rationally – of what the administration could do to their careers. Finally, they may be scared – quite irrationally – of physical harm at the hands of the Bush administration. All of us are quite capable of irrational fears. NoPod is scared of Negroes and Arabs, which is why he insists on bombing Iran. Woody Allen is afraid of dying and being stuffed with crabmeat. No reason to assume that media figures don’t have irrational fears too.