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Dear Santa... Dear Santa, This year I've been busy! Last week I helped akirlu hide a body (365 points). Last Tuesday lacecorset and I donated clothes to the needy (11 points). In June I stole thehippiechick's purse (-30 points). In November I pushed patgreene in the mud (-17 points). In January I put gum in williebanger's hair (-12 points). Overall, I've been good (317 points). For Christmas I deserve a pony! Sincerely, pecunium

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The Media, and my present complaints

I used to be a member of the press, and for the entirety of that time (and even more in the present) I have heard the press is biased, and that the bias is to the left.

I don't see it.

Digby has a long piece up on this, and while all of it is worth reading I'll excerpt the relevant bits; in light of my comment above.

The DC press corps has no idea how they look to the rest of the country after more than a decade of running with GOP trumped up scandals, pimping for impeachment, trivializing the effects of an unorthodox presidential election in 2000, and then saluting smartly and following Dick Cheney over the cliff on Iraq. We liberals never thought of the press as particularly partisan. We thought of it as competent or incompetent. But for a lot of reasons, for the last 15 years the DC press corps have far too often aligned themselves with a manipulative GOP political establishment to the point where it's been hard to see where one ends and the other begins. It's not a matter of political preference. It's insiderism. And when you become an insider in a corrupt system, for money, access, fame, fun whatever ... you become corrupt yourself.

I'm not surprised that the WaPo staffers don't like links to bloggers and others on the WaPo site. We are very critical. And I'm sure that we are often unfair and often flat wrong. But it would behoove these guys to stop consoling themselves with the notion that they "must be doing something right" if both sides are mad at them, and take a good look at the nature of these complaints. The right has spent the last quarter century in an organized campaign to work the refs and push the dialog to the right. The complaints coming from the left are the result of pent-up frustration at the tabloidization, the celebrity chasing, the insiderism. We have no organized campaign and we don't see the media as being politically biased. We see it as abdicating its duty to sort out the important from the trivial and connect the dots in these confusing times that are ruled by spin, PR and marketing on all sides.

This country cannot survive without proper journalism. Blogs can't do it. We need newspapers and news broadcasters who keep foremost in their minds the fact that they are indispensible to a functioning democracy. For the last fifteen years Washington politics have been covered as if they are high school with money. The DC press corps needs to reacquaint themselves with the idea that their purpose is not to have drinks with powerful insiders so they can keep their confidences. Their job is to have drinks with powerful insiders so they can get to the truth and write about it.

He's right. The press has failed the nation, not because they are biased (all in all, at this point I would say they are, but to the side of the money... they folks who own the papers, and those who offer access are the people the press are looking to keep happy, which means they have abandoned the idea of comforting the afflicted [always to be commended] and afflicting the comfortable [never really to be condemned]) but because they are afraid of losing privilege. They have allowed those who provide access to buy them with it.

Is anonymity needful? Sometimes. I think, in the five years I was really working on papers, I gave three people permission to go, "off the record." I used it never. In that same time I think the papers I was at (or the part of them I was working for) allowed it twice.

Jefferson (whose opinion changed, somwhat, when he was president) said he would rather have a press without government, than a government without a press. Why? Because an independant press is supposed to hold the feet of the powerful to the fire.

These days, the better analogy is that they bring them logs to stave off the cold.