The punditocracy
David Sirota takes a swipe at the media opinion makers known as the "punditocracy" and concludes a lot of the problem is geography. From The Huffington Post:
Flipping through channels a week or so ago, I saw Brian Williams being interviewed by Charlie Rose, or to put it more accurately, General Electric being interviewed by Bloomberg L.P. As GE and Bloomberg LP prattled on about why The Nightly News is discrete about showing the effects of wars and other horrible things (it's dinner time in "rock-ribbed America" or whatever) I had a sudden and profound realization: these people are utterly clueless about most things. (Yes, another "duh, stilwell" moment.) Hey, nobody wants to see disturbing images, and I generally shy away from them myself, but the Iraq war has been so sanitized that the media acquiesced to administration prohibitions against showing caskets.
Sure, the pundits and high-profile national reporters live lives of privilege and wealth, but they don't understand nor seem to care much about the rest of us. Sirota, rightly in my view, attributes this to a lust for power rather than an ideology.
Tim Russert let Dick Cheney lie right to his face during the run-up to war not because Tim Russert is a Republican but because Russert gets all goose-bumpy being close to power.
The sick thing is nothing has changed much. There was a massive voter revolt against neo-conservatism on Nov. 7, but you wouldn't really know it from reading the op-ed pages, which seem to be full of arguments about how Democrats better not "go too far" and earnest discussions of which Democratic leader might have had cosmetic surgery. In a quest for "balance," newspapers allow right wing columnists to print the worst sort of personal attacks. Nancy Pelosi is a bitch, you know.
The best thing, of course, is to ignore the chattering class, but unfortunately they tend to influence public opinion through their sheer omnipresence. The silver lining is that thousands of progressive bloggers around the country are daily coming up with more trenchant analysis than all of the corporate world put together. And Sirota correctly notes that there are a few voices of sanity like Bob Herbert out there. We haste to add that Keith Olbermann can vacation any place he wants as far as we're concerned.
But while the voters have spoken, the Gang of 500 will spend the next two years chipping away at the conclusion rightly drawn by the majority of Americans, especially when it comes to foreign policy. After all, you can't trust the regular folks with important decisions; they might do something stupid like get us bogged down in an unwinnable war.
That's right folks, the stereotype is, by and large, factually true: coastal elites are trying to impose a very narrow world view on the rest of the country - and people sense it because the opinionmaking machine is so uniform, and the media so consolidated, that this very narrow world view is being jammed down our throats everywhere. Hell, I can see it right there in my face when I sit down for a bagel at my local coffee shop in Helena, Montana, and open the local paper's commentary section, which - like many local papers' opinion pages these days - is now dominated by "national" pundits. On any given day, I see pieces from George Will trumpeting a New York City billionaire for his Wall Street conservatism. Or, I see right-wing Washington nobody Mona Charen and her latest screed demanding that all Jews adhere to neoconservatism as proof of their religious devotion. At best, if I'm lucky, I get a David Broder piece telling me how anyone who thinks our economic policies should serve middle America is a "protectionist" worthy of being tarred and feathered.The full post is a great read. At a time when people are looking for better content and creative solutions to problems, the national media universe is so restricted and incestuous that it debilitates the national debate. Most of America does not vacation at Martha's Vineyard, as Sirota alludes.
Flipping through channels a week or so ago, I saw Brian Williams being interviewed by Charlie Rose, or to put it more accurately, General Electric being interviewed by Bloomberg L.P. As GE and Bloomberg LP prattled on about why The Nightly News is discrete about showing the effects of wars and other horrible things (it's dinner time in "rock-ribbed America" or whatever) I had a sudden and profound realization: these people are utterly clueless about most things. (Yes, another "duh, stilwell" moment.) Hey, nobody wants to see disturbing images, and I generally shy away from them myself, but the Iraq war has been so sanitized that the media acquiesced to administration prohibitions against showing caskets.
Sure, the pundits and high-profile national reporters live lives of privilege and wealth, but they don't understand nor seem to care much about the rest of us. Sirota, rightly in my view, attributes this to a lust for power rather than an ideology.
Tim Russert let Dick Cheney lie right to his face during the run-up to war not because Tim Russert is a Republican but because Russert gets all goose-bumpy being close to power.
The sick thing is nothing has changed much. There was a massive voter revolt against neo-conservatism on Nov. 7, but you wouldn't really know it from reading the op-ed pages, which seem to be full of arguments about how Democrats better not "go too far" and earnest discussions of which Democratic leader might have had cosmetic surgery. In a quest for "balance," newspapers allow right wing columnists to print the worst sort of personal attacks. Nancy Pelosi is a bitch, you know.
The best thing, of course, is to ignore the chattering class, but unfortunately they tend to influence public opinion through their sheer omnipresence. The silver lining is that thousands of progressive bloggers around the country are daily coming up with more trenchant analysis than all of the corporate world put together. And Sirota correctly notes that there are a few voices of sanity like Bob Herbert out there. We haste to add that Keith Olbermann can vacation any place he wants as far as we're concerned.
But while the voters have spoken, the Gang of 500 will spend the next two years chipping away at the conclusion rightly drawn by the majority of Americans, especially when it comes to foreign policy. After all, you can't trust the regular folks with important decisions; they might do something stupid like get us bogged down in an unwinnable war.
