A Welcome Mea Culpa

Rosa Brooks' column in yesterday's Los Angeles Times is a breath of fresh air. Someone in the press has finally called the press to reckoning.

THE MEDIA'S Stockholm syndrome finally seems to be wearing off.

Like freed hostages who gradually cease to identify with their captors, mainstream media outlets seem to have been seized by a new spirit of liberation in their coverage of the Bush administration. Lately, we've seen a rash of astonished, outraged stories and editorials relating to the administration's recently discovered malfeasance. ...

The new media message is righteous and clear: Administration officials tricked us — all of us! They assured us that everything they did was legal … necessary … for our own good … but now we see that they were lying!

...I'm finding all this astonishment and giddy outrage a little off-putting.

It's not that outrage at the Bush administration isn't justified. It's entirely true, as an editorial in this paper declared stoutly Wednesday, that all "the Fourth of July language in the presidential statement" on the commutation of Libby's sentence shouldn't "disguise the [administration's] corruption of a fundamental American value: that all must be equal before the law." ...

Someday, historians will ponder our strange collective passivity in the face of Bush-Cheney madness. Why did the editorial boards of our major newspapers either parrot the administration line or raise only muted criticism on so many issues, and for so long? Where were the tough journalistic questions? [Emphasis in the original]

Those same questions have been raised by liberal bloggers for more than seven years, literally from the day the Supreme Court annointed George Bush as King. For many of us, the answers became clearer as the press took on the role of stenographers for this administration. Those reporters whose beat was the nation's capital had become so enmeshed in the Beltway culture that they willingly assumed that role lest they be denied the access that made their bylines so precious. For every Helen Thomas there was a Bob Woodward and a David Broder and a Tim Russert who thought being part of the story was far more lucrative than covering it honestly.

And the editorial boards of major newspapers soon learned that they were responsible not to the public they were supposed to serve but to the Board of Directors of the corporations who owned them.

A free and vigorous press? Not any more. Not by a longshot.