Courtiers and Courtesans, by Robert Gore

Corruption is a scourge infecting almost everyone who comes in contact with it. The media is not immune. There was never a golden age when an incorruptible press exposed political and government skullduggery without fear or favor. The press’s shrine to itself—Watergate—was, to use a well-worn phrase, a partisan witch hunt; unthinkable if President Nixon had been a Democrat and had not been loathed by the media elite. As Nixon knew, his two Democratic predecessors had committed more heinous acts that the press had never turned into causes célèbre. As the two main political parties have merged to become the party of government (the only remaining differences are who gets to dispense the spoils and to whom) the press has become its public relations arm, regardless of which party holds nominal power.

Washington’s endemic insularity and corruption have bred the political counter-revolution propelling Donald Trump’s, Bernie Sanders’, and to a lesser extent, Ted Cruz’s campaigns. Nobody should mistake the diffusion of the anger and its occasional incoherence for transience or impotency. Trump and Sanders have already made fools of the pundits who said their campaigns would fizzle by New Year’s. Some mainstream media figures have acknowledged that this phenomena is as much a vote against politics as usual as it is an endorsement of those candidates. However, there have been few media acknowledgements that it is also a vote against the media itself, the mouthpiece of the established order. There has been no shortage of snotty articles, editorials, and hit pieces on Trump, Sanders, their issues, and their voters.

While the press cannot be spared condemnation, fairness requires an effort to understand the condemned. The media are big businesses. As Richard Maybury recently pointed out, in the moral quagmire of the mixed economy, they are subject to the pressures and harassment from government that can afflict any business: tax audits, regulatory extortion, blackmail, corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, and arbitrary, unfair, and costly civil litigation and criminal prosecution. What the media broadcasts or publishes has a direct effect on public perceptions and political status, making it more susceptible to government pressure and skullduggery than most other businesses. The government can make life difficult for recalcitrants that don’t play ball, and potentially put them out of business.

Like other businesses, the media must navigate innovation and change, notably the Internet. James Howard Kunstler recently lamented the demise of investigative reporting of the kind dramatized in the movie Spotlight.

The message was that the institutional support for great journalism that allowed the Globe’s Spotlight reporting team to do its job is now gone-baby-gone. All the newspapers in the USA, and even the TV and radio news networks, are running these days on skeleton crews. At least that is true of the old flagship organizations such as the Boston Globe and CNN. They just don’t have the reporters out in the field. The front-page or flatscreen interface that the public sees conceals ghost organizations that barely have the reporting resources and the reach to discover what is actually going on in the world.

Getting paid for uncovering information has become problematic when the Internet has so much information for free. Any journalistic enterprise that occasionally stands against the tide, making the effort necessary for what used to be called a “scoop,” will probably see it online within hours of its original publication.

Here the excuses for the mainstream media end. Even if one accepts the lack-of-resources plea, the press makes choices about which stories get covered and which do not. Those choices and the stories that get published reflect underlying biases. (SLL assumes everyone is biased, SLL most assuredly so.) Detecting the mainstream media’s overarching bias is easy: it cheerleads for the continuing expansion of the government’s power. Not coincidentally, that ideological orientation dovetails with both foreign interventionism and expansion of the domestic welfare, regulatory, and redistributive state—the dominant policy goals of the Republican and Democratic establishments, respectively.

The most underreported story for decades has been the blatant incompetence and corruption of government, starting with the New Deal (history books now repeat journalistic error). The failures of the Vietnam War, and wars on poverty, drugs, and terrorism; macroeconomic mismanagement by the government and the Federal Reserve; the sub rosa, long-running deterioration of the American economy; bailouts, regulatory capture, and other manifestations of crony capitalism; ballooning debt and entitlement commitments; the destruction of once-thriving cities by municipal governments—usually Democratic—and their union cronies; the global reach of the US military’s commitments and bases; the burgeoning movement to upgrade and expand a nuclear arsenal that can already destroy the world several times over; the surveillance state and intelligence agency skullduggery, and the federal government’s destructive involvement with education and medical care—most recently the Common Core and Obamacare fiascos—should be fodder for thousand of stories. Instead, they have been reported and analyzed mostly online and on the margins of the mainstream media. Anyone who proposes and advocates yet another expansion of government is assured a respectful hearing and positive press, while anyone who questions the premise of governmental competence is marginalized as a crank and consigned to the Internet (see SLL’s blog list).

Mainstream media is filled with courtiers and courtesans. The media’s dereliction of its watchdog duty and devolution to propaganda organ has been an indispensable adjunct to the expansion of the government and its powers. The lust for power, though invariably corrupting, is understandable: it’s good to be the King. Those seeking it may believe their motivations are honorable, at least at the outset. Toadying to those in power, on the other hand, never rises above contemptible, which is why so many of today’s media lights are such unsubstantial and often grotesque people, on a par with run of the mill Hollywood celebrities and other such zephyrs and gargoyles.

“An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as free people,” is a quote often erroneously (according to monticello.org) attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but the idea is more important than its source. The flip side of a captured press is a complicit readership. A citizenry that refuses to educate itself, that abandons skepticism, that will not question, probe, or dig, deserves what it gets

The damage caused by the press’s abandonment of any semblance of an adversarial relationship to the government has been huge. The danger posed going forward is even more monumental. Government attempts to suppress the truth will intensify. The official narrative’s divergence from reality will continue to grow. As the globe descends into financial, economic, and geopolitical chaos, accurate information and astute analysis will be increasingly scarce and therefore, increasingly valuable. Reliance on the mainstream media will be downright dangerous. Anyone preparing for what’s to come must take the same care with their informational and analytic sources as they do with their gold, guns, and food stores. No source is perfect or free of biases, but if you’re seeking, wisely, to step outside the matrix, the SLL blog roll is a good place to start.

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