More 'Shame of the Media'

Joker-to-the-Thief is hoping to diversify the point of views offered on its blog by having guests every once in a while. Here is our friend Greg's extensive comment and analysis of the media after reading out posting The Shame od the Media. He is our first guest on our blog and we gladly welcome him.

The issue of an emboldened U.S. media corps in the wake of the Administration's Katrina fiasco deserves some refinement.
Indeed, the mishandling of Katrina has seemed to put the fire under the feet of several of America's most visible media figures, both on the left and the right (Thomas Friedman, yes, but also David Brooks, of all people).
It should be noted, however, that the trend had begun somewhat earlier, when the eye of the Valerie Plame storm stalled squarely over the head of the elusive and conniving Karl Rove. The White House press corps, in that instance, was refreshingly less forgiving than in the last four years, and took White House spokesman Scott Mclellan neatly to task, on national television, for all the world to see. Similarly, National Public Radio--traditionally so prim in questions of journalistic decorum--shook off its kid gloves and began asking the incisive questions many American media watchers had missed for so long (if you cull the NPR archives for July, you'll get a good idea of the coverage of the Plame case).
As for US media deference and the wave of patriotic myopism in general post 9/11, some nuance is in order: First, an endemic flimsiness was arguably already rampant in the press even before the destruction of the Twin Towers, especially in the White House press corps, where media coverage has long been a staged spectacle (the Clinton administration was, sadly, no exception, though its manipulation of the message, visual and textual, never reached the heights of fanatical demagoguery to which the W. Bush team has soared). Access to the White House press room has, over the years, become a circus of personal, professional ambition more than a forum of journalistic integrity, with reporters vying for, and then covetously protecting their precarious access to the president. They do so largely by posing what seem to be systematically innocuous questions. The President, meanwhile, can stifle the pestering of anyone he sees as a challenge to his good image, either by exiling them to the back of the room, refusing to address them, or ousting them from the press conferences altogether.
To be sure, if the press corps after 9/11 was given to wanton submission to the Administration, it was in no small way in concert with the deftly managed media-bullying of the latter. The Bush Administration--the Republican Party at large, in fact--has since its rise to dominance in 2000, simply done a better job than anyone on the left at exploiting the media to its designs. Period.
Not to be overlooked in the case of America's disappointingly benign main-stream media, however, is the equally deferent public of American news consumers. Those of us who craved incisive, critical news coverage had long since given up on the mainstream media, even before 9/11, and
I must assert that options for genuinely good news coverage abound in the States, on all points along the political gammut. Most Americans, though, while by no means as indifferent to current events as many observers abroad would assume, have nonetheless increasingly gravitated in their news preferences, either toward the digestible (read: CNN Headline News) or the unabashedly sordid (read: the news of so-called Yellow journalism that proliferates everywhere in the U.S., Europe and most of the world, for that matter: I cite the likes of "reporters" like Geraldo Rivera). This, of course, in detriment to the tougher, leaner, less palatable kind of coverage usually associated with real journalistic rigor. That trend, I would add, has occupied not merely the past several years, but rather the past several decades. And it
stands to ask oneself whether this is an exclusively American phenomenon, or whether it belies a far broader transformation of media consumption in the industrialized world at large.
In the oft rarefied air of French news coverage à Le Monde, etc., it can often seem like the United States has clearly cornered the market for spineless media. It may seem true, though it likely is not. More probable is that most of the European media's attention with respect to the United States in the past several years has been addressed more to the simplicities of the Bush Administration's projection of its own image to the mainstream news channels, rather than to the subtleties, complexities and contradictions of American political and social reality that no President has ever been capable of repressing.
At least not yet.
GC, Paris