Mainstream Journalism, RIP
By Peter Klein • Wednesday December 17, 2008 2:01 PM PDT • 5 Comments
[Cross-posted at Organizations and Markets]
Last week’s WSJ carried an op-ed from SEC Chair Christopher Cox, “We Need a Bailout Exit Strategy.” The op-ed was nothing special (mostly defending the SEC, of course, though there was a nice Hayekian line about “decentralized decision-making, in which millions of independent economic actors make judgments using their own money, [resulting] in the wisest allocation of scarce resources across our complex society”). What caught my eye was the headline, which suggests a connection between the bailout and the Iraq war, a connection I’ve been meaning to write about.
Remember how journalists felt deceived by the Bush Administration about the war? President Bush said that Saddam Hussein was a “grave and growing threat,” and the media repeated this line. Colin Powell showed pictures of the mobile weapons trailers and the New York Times reprinted them with enthusiasm. When the Administration’s claims proved false, the mea culpas began. Judith Miller resigned in disgrace. Never again, the media cried, will we be used as house propaganda organs. And yet, once the financial crisis began, the exact pattern was repeated. Bernanke and Paulson say there’s a “credit freeze,” that the financial sector is on the verge of collapse, that they alone know what to do—so that’s what the newspapers print. No time to investigate, to interview anyone outside the government, to hold these claims up to any critical scrutiny. If high officials say credit markets are frozen, that only “bold action” from the Treasury, the Fed, and Congress can prevent total meltdown, then that’s the way it is. Virtually every news report on the crisis followed the official script. It’s as if the financial reporters from the Times, the WSJ, the Washington Post, CNN, etc. were embedded with the Treasury. News reports have been little more than government press conferences. Shame, journalists, shame!
Why Oh Why, as Brad DeLong would say, can’t we have a press corps that investigates, rather than simply repeating what the government asserts?
Tags: Bailouts, Presidential Power, Regulation, The State 
Amen to that. Our “free” press is an embarrassment. Their primary job is to be the watchdog against government abuse. Instead, they’ve been co-opted into the government-corporate partnership, and the unwashed masses are worse off for it.
Thank goodness for the Internet! Otherwise we’d be in chains already...for our own good, of course.
Steve Hogan | Dec 17, 2008 | Reply
The MSM is a joke! Kudos to those who expose them as nothing but establishment shills.
Patrick Krey | Dec 18, 2008 | Reply
What is really sickening is not only that the unconstitutional programs being “covered” by corporatist media are being “paid for” by the tens (in some cases, hundreds) of billions in U.S. loot, but also that the constitutionality of said plunderings is almost never mentioned. If it is, then it’s always “what [enter easily-marginalized party's name] sees as unconstitutional.” The rest of the report will be a smothering monologue of state-worship, pitting two sides of the same statist greenback in a race down the stovepipe. Maddening. When was the last time AP contacted — or simply paraphrased — an Austrian Schooler for their input?
D. Alba | Dec 19, 2008 | Reply
What about the utter canard that GM, Ford and Chrysler constitute the entire US “domestic auto industry”? Never mind that there are 8 other auto manufacturers in 12 states that employ many tens of thousands of Americans and produce virtually every car that they sell in the US, in the US (not to mention many cars produced here that they sell elsewhere). To correct that misconception might require research, persuasion, and allocation of resources by the media conglomerates. Too much like work! Easier to just prattle on about the “Big Three” and how everything auto-related is so intertwined that no piece of the whole can possibly be subjected to honest market forces. Unrelenting douchebaggery, the lot of it!
-Alex
Alex Goristal | Dec 22, 2008 | Reply