The Great Mainstream Media Implosion

As someone who bled printers ink at newspapers for 35 years and has a second career as a blogger, the big message in former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s blockbuster of a book is not that George Bush is a resume without a man, that there was an orchestrated effort to lie to a public traumatized by the 9/11 attacks in the run-up to the Iraq war, or that Karl Rove makes Machiavelli look like a Boy Scout. It is that the mainstream news media’s march toward irrelevance is well deserved.

This is a judgment that stems in large part from the news media’s abrogation in covering all three of the biggest stories of the young millennium:

George Bush’s historic reign of error, including his extralegal power grabs and embrace of the use of torture.

That the Iraq war is responsible for everything from the continuing growth of the Islamic jihad to the explosion of oil prices.

Nobody likes being called names and the thin-skinned Washington press corps is no exception. That is why so many reporters and commentators have taken umbrage at McClellan’s view that the news media was so credulous and so bought that it gobbled up the White House’s pre-war propaganda like so many canapes at a Rose Garden reception.

(This kind of moots the right-wing myth of the “liberal” media, eh? And would Bush have skated to a second term if Mr. Bill Keller of The New York Times and other powerful news execs done their jobs?)

Yes, McClellan has some issues of his own, including why he didn’t mind being lied to – and gave the finger to the few reporters who were skeptical – until it was time to cash in on a book.

Yes, the post-9/11 world was frighteningly unfamiliar territory, but that did not abrogate the news media’s responsibility to ask tough questions about why we were so utterly unprepared for an attack on the homeland.

Yes, there have been exceptions to the news media’s wretched performance, but none of the leading print and broadcast outlets have covered themselves in glory covering these three major stories.

Yes, the alternatives to the mainstream media — notably blogs – have their own issues, including their unedited nature and the proclivity to play loose and fast with the facts.

The seeds for the news media’s march toward irrelevance were sewn well before George Bush was anointed the Republican presidential nominee in 2000, and are the result of two perversely complementary trends . . .

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