Blame It On Steinski

Thoughts on Life

What’s the difference between a journalist and a stenographer?

What's the difference between a journalist and a stenographer?These days, they’re the same thing.

As Steven Colbert said at the White House Press Association Dinner when he was ripping Bush and the assembled sycophantic media workers new assholes: “Your job is to copy down what you’re told to write, then go home at 6 PM and play with your kids.”

And journalists wonder why newspapers are going out of business?

In Glenn Greenwald’s review of Walter Cronkite’s excellent work as an actual journalist, he quotes Lewis Lapham, speaking about Tim Russert, mouthpiece of the rich and powerful:

“On television the voices of dissent can’t be counted upon to match the studio drapes or serve as tasteful lead-ins to the advertisements for Pantene Pro-V and the U.S. Marine Corps.

What we now know as the “news media” serve at the pleasure of the corporate sponsor, their purpose not to tell truth to the powerful but to transmit lies to the powerless.

Like Russert, who served his apprenticeship as an aide-de-camp to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, most of the prominent figures in the Washington press corps (among them George Stephanopoulos, Bob Woodward, and Karl Rove) began their careers as bagmen in the employ of a dissembling politician or a corrupt legislature.

Regarding themselves as de facto members of government, enabling and codependent, their point of view is that of the country’s landlords, their practice equivalent to what is known among Wall Street stock-market touts as “securitizing the junk.”

When requesting explanations from secretaries of defense or congressional committee chairmen, they do so with the understanding that any explanation will do.

Explain to us, my captain, why the United States must go to war in Iraq, and we will relay the message to the American people in words of one or two syllables.

Instruct us, Mr. Chairman, in the reasons why K-Street lobbyists produce the paper that Congress passes into law, and we will show that the reasons are healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Do not be frightened by our pretending to be suspicious or scornful. Together with the television camera that sees but doesn’t think, we’re here to watch, to fall in with your whims and approve your injustices.

Give us this day our daily bread, and we will hide your vices in the rosebushes of salacious gossip and clothe your crimes in the aura of inspirational anecdote.”

And if we’re the Washington Post, we’ll publish op-ed pieces by Sarah Palin as if she had anything more than the intellect of a 12 year-old.

Greenwald’s on the money. Read about it.

P.S.: Oliver Willis has something pertinent to point out, as well.

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