The assault began in July 2003, when Joseph Wilson accused the president of lying. Wilson's charges have since been thoroughly discredited and the author of The Politics of Truth revealed as unreliable. But the damage was done. Wilson's claim that the Bush administration had knowingly cooked intelligence provided the prism through which many reporters viewed the election.
For some 16 months, then, journalists at the New York Times and the Washington Post and the television networks saw themselves not as conveyors of facts but as truth-squadders, toiling away on the gray margins of political debate to elucidate the many misstatements, exaggerations, and outright lies of the Bush administration and its campaign affiliates. Sometimes these "fact-check" pieces were labeled "news analysis." More often, they were splashed on the front page as straight news or presented on the evening news.
Many of these reporters were trained at the best universities in the country. They fancy themselves thinkers, not mere scribes. They go to work every day to tell us not what the Bush administration has said, but what it has left unsaid. They are scornful of the president's "simple" worldview--where Americans are good and terrorists are evil, where nations are with us or against us--and suspicious of his motives. They inhabit a world where Bush administration policymakers are incapable of telling the truth and "intelligence officials," especially those who provide them leaks, are unimpeachable. They knew that the Bush campaign lied more than the Kerry campaign and that when the Kerry campaign lied it was of little or no consequence.
My short time in journalism taught me one thing: liberals are attracted to journalism because they want to change the world. They believe that everything is relative, and they would rather history was written by the "smart people" who "get it" than by the thugs and brutes who actually make said history. The fantasy is that they are impartial observers, invisible men and women recording what they see without changing anything, but in truth they want to be inside but somehow outside the action, to influence events without being influenced themselves.
Of course, the presence of an observer changes the experiment whether you want it to or not. And journalists today aren't really interested in staying out of the fray; they're desperate for the kind of power and influence the people they cover enjoy constantly. They KNOW they could do a better job than George W. Bush. It's like looking at a friend's failing marriage and saying to yourself, can't they see they're doing it all wrong? I could fix that in an instant. But you couldn't, and you should know it by early adulthood, unless you're a megalomaniacal jerk and a know-it-all with little real-world experience.
I'm sure I've said this before here, but journalism is not a profession, it's a trade. Journalists used to be experts in one or more fields for a long time before they began to cover one of those fields for a newspaper or magazine. By the time they were writing for a living, they had lived, and not in a college setting, but as real men and women out in the real world. And one thing I've realized lately is that living your life is what makes you a good writer, not being good at writing. Even the best writer must have something to write about, and until you've lived a full life, you're just borrowing your style from those who have.
Most news writers today attend college and then graduate school to become professional journalists, and go directly to a newspaper or magazine and start writing stories. There will be no more tales about the kid who comes to work in the mail room, gets an opportunity to set type and do a little copy editing, and then starts a long writing career that eventually takes him up the ladder to an editorship. And that's a real shame. One of the great failures of the Kerry campaign was putting too much stock in George Soros' team of young, brash and net-savvy writer/bloggers and Moveon.org's gaggle of youngsters, who promptly derailed the Democrats permanently and gave the Red States even more reason to vote for W. Youth may be king, but it won't make you one.
Faced with people like Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, and Powell, it's an act of supreme arrogance to imagine that Harvard J-school prepares you in any way to instruct them on the subtleties of Middle Eastern diplomacy. And yet they do, and we accept it, because there's no obvious way to show our disapproval other than boycott, and who's got the time for that? Maybe we should make time to find a way to let the mainstream media know we've had enough and that their accountability-free ride is over.
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