People waste a lot of time, effort, and
money trying to figure out what the press’ real agenda is.
Speaking as a journalist who has worked
for many organizations over the years, I will tell you precisely what
their agenda is.
It’s now.
Not tomorrow, not yesterday. Now. Right
now. It’s not just ADHD, in the TV age it’s practically autistic.
Republicans have been taking advantage
of this bias for nearly 40 years. It was 36 years ago, during the
campaign officially launching the new Thesis, the Thesis of Conflict,
that Spiro Agnew (pictured) dubbed media pundits “nattering nabobs
of negativism.”
(Yes, I know it was written by William Safire.)
The crowd ate it up. Just as they ate
up Nixon’s attacks on college students, and their teachers, and the
Black Panthers, and by extension black leaders. Vietnam would be
lost, and the whole political battle after 1968 was one of
apportioning blame. Right or wrong (and I think wrong) Agnew’s side
won.
But the media never learned. They
never, ever learned. As this tactic of division became ingrained in
American politics, reporters simply accepted it. They pretended it
had no history and no future, no consequences. They still do.
So when I read an otherwise-intelligent
blogger like Billmon wondering why Wolf Blitzer doesn’t get it when
Lynne Cheney attacks him,
or how Ron Brownstein doesn’t get it that Republicans seek absolute
power through narrow mandates,
I just nod my head. When Atrios complains of ABC News political
director Mark Halperin genuflecting through another Agnew wannabe,
I just sigh.
That’s the way it is. But it can change.
This political thesis has dominated our
politics for 38 years. That’s longer than most reporters working in
most news organizations have been alive. To see the past, they think,
would be a form of bias. And their bosses would consider it just
that. So they go on their autistic way.
But we don’t have to. Despite press
claims that the blogosphere is just about crazy, misleading
back-and-forth, the blogosphere (like the Internet itself) is not any
one thing. It’s a medium through which anything can be sent, and
seen, no matter how few believe. This blog could not exist in print –
there isn’t enough money in it (although I did get a nice check from
Google today). Neither could 99% of the blogs out there. It’s not
about money, or audience, or attention. It’s a means, not the end.
So the age of Agnew is dying. No one
has to live in the media bubble anymore. No one has to live with that
autism if they don’t want to.
Spiro Agnew died in 1996. (That’s his grave.) His political
archetypes are dying as you read this. They will die because they
have no answers to the problems of today. They lack the capacity to
even ask the proper questions. The same is true for the TV media that
has dominated this era.
Internet politics does not just
overthrow the old political order. It overthrows everything. It does
not just sweep away George W. Bush. It also sweeps away Wolf Blitzer,
and Ron Brownstein, and Mark Halperin. That’s why they grab hold of
the old order like it was a life raft from the Titanic. It is. But
the water is cold, freezing cold, and their own blood is freezing,
and they can’t survive. Soon, they will be forced to let go….
