The Beltway Journalists Running Scared

Another great post by Glenn Greenwald, on the Beltway mentality, and their fear that Obama just might have really meant what he said during his campaign for the presidency. The media lies to the public constantly. The media distorts reality to the public constantly. And this is supported by the bad guys in government that have something to gain by distorting public opinion to gain their advantage. And just like Greenwald, I am sick and tired of it. Journalists are not supposed to regurgitate press releases ... they are supposed to research and report on the truth and relevancy of the topics. But, between the singularly corporate controlled media (anyone notice the change in tone in editorials once Murdoch took over the WSJ? Yeah, I thought so) and their government officials with a stake in the lies, it has become patently possible to watch and/or read anything emanating from what is considered main stream media.

It's amazing how explicitly Brooks here is endorsing -- and demanding -- deliberate deceit of the public. There is, for obvious reasons, extreme anger among the American citizenry towards the piggish sleaze, systematic corruption, and wholesale destruction permeating the political establishment and our political and financial elites. In order to pacify those sentiments, political elites tolerated, perhaps even desired, a presidential candidate with credible outsider pretenses who claimed to empathize with that popular anger and who wanted to combat the political elites who were the targets of it -- but only on the condition that he didn't really mean any of it, that it was all just a means to deceive people into believing that they still live in some sort of responsive democracy and they retain even a minimal ability to shape what the Government does. The anti-Washington rhetoric Obama was spouting was tolerated by media elites only to the extent that none of it was sincere.

There is a direct relationship between (a) evidence that Obama didn't mean any of his campaign rhetoric and doesn't intend to do anything other than blend into and perpetuate the Washington status quo; and (b) the media's sentiments towards Obama. The more there is of (a), the more positive is (b). Conversely, the less there is of (a), the more negative is (b). That's why Brooks is angry with Obama here: there is almost a suggestion that Obama might have meant some of the critiques he voiced about Washington during the campaign or, at the very least, that Obama's anti-Washington rhetoric might force him, now and then, to oppose prevailing Washington orthodoxies and go against dominant Washington power centers even if Obama doesn't want to (which is what happened when his "campaign blather" forced Daschle out). Brooks is fearful and thus angry that Obama created a Frankenstein: leading people to believe that there would be any changes in Washington and that they had the right to expect it.

[snip]

This is exactly what Brooks is saying. Indeed, if one reviews most of the political controversies of the last decade, one finds exactly this dynamic: the political and media establishment joining together to deliberately distort American public opinion and thus render it irrelevant in what the political class does: the mass desire for de-funding of and withdrawal from Iraq; the overwhelming demand for investigations into Bush crimes during the administration; the widespread belief now that those crimes must be investigated; the extreme majorities favoring "even-handedness" in our Middle East policies; economic policies and government processes promoting the interests of the majority rather than the narrow corporate interests that so transparently own and control political officials. The overarching role of the Beltway journalist is to obscure and distort those widely-held views on the part of the citizenry and thus prevent them from having any impact, protect political power from those beliefs.