Insider Outsiders

by digby

When did the mainstream DC press come to believe that they represent outside the beltway thinking?

Today, Josh Marshall notes:

…there’s just nothing more precious than seeing the faux-populist poseur Post editorial writers standing tough against an entrenched “establishment” of thirty-something, tenure-desperate semioticians and lit geeks in defense of “mainstream American values”, a well of mores and beliefs with which the Post is no doubt deeply in touch. (Peel away the Fred Hiatt mask and underneath it’s Bruce Springsteen; cut a little deeper and he’s an Iowa farmer.)

Precious indeed. I caught the same thing coming from the Wall Street Journal(!) editor “Paul Gigot, GOP good ole boy who apparently lives somewhere in rural Nebraska:”

…I didn’t speak to anybody from the White House or the vice president’s office all week on this. It was looking at it from outside the Beltway and saying where did this story stand on the relative scale of importance?

Gigot, too, evidently believes he has his finger on the heartland pulse.

This is why we are having such a disconnect with the mainstream press. They are laboring under some ridiculous belief that they are the voice of the people when they are actually the voice of the establishment — which is, by the way, Republican.

Democrats have a very bad habit of paying too much attention to the beltway punditocrisy. Online media isn’t going to change the world as we know it, but it might just be able to break up this abusive relationship and get them looking outside the beltway more. The establishment does not favor Democrats but thars gold in them thar hills if they care to look.

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