Have I mentioned I hate Fred Hiatt? And fwiw, the WaPo editorial board over the last two decades has done more damage to this nation than 1000 Edward Snowdens. -John Cole, Balloon Juice
I imagine a Village where "Woodward" is the name, but everything else stays entirely the same.
So, we go from Michael Kinsley being a total stooge for the Powers that Be, and Jonathan Alter giving him a Twitter reach-around as a reward for the belief that serial liars like Hayden and Cheney deciding what is worthy of being kept secret should actually trump journalism itself, especially if you really hate the guy who beat you to the scoop (and that is exactly what you are backing when you back 'let the government always decide what we have a right to know or don't, and, man, I'm so cool with all of this reactionary bullshit because I really hate that goddamned Glenn Greenwald'), to Jeffrey Goldberg saying that if the NYT decided not to run Michael Kinsley's snide high school slam book take on Glenn Greenwald’s book, that would be an act of censorship on par with not reporting on the substance of Snowden's NSA leaks, to Andrew Sullivan deliberately misreading Kinsley to attack the NYT's public represtantative for daring to be critical of Michael Kinsley's book review, while Fred Hiatt goes seething at President Obama for, after epic fails in Iraq and Afghanistan, refusing to be President McCain. Seriously. Is there any wonder why schools wither, but the Benghazi Industrial Complex thrives?
Not a single solitary member of the Village elite who are rending their garments and gnashing their teeth about the NSA leak story and its various players would be doing any of what they are doing now if somebody that they liked had been the catalyst to bringing Edward Snowden into the public eye and revealing his NSA leaks as their story. Many of those most vociferous voices of condemnation would be saying the exact opposite of what they are saying now if somebody else was the tip of the sword. This matters. The ability to see that this is so, and understand why it is so, is precious and important to ending this lingering age of incompetence excused and capricious cabals who are above the law as much as they are above reproach. Nothing changes, no matter how bad things get, because something stays fundamentally the same no matter what in our country today. The Very Serious People. Their rules. Their in-house exceptions to their rules. Their foibles. Their feuds. Their fetishes and fixations. There is something that I want to put out there, as Eric Shinseki's resignation from the VA is feted like one part low-information voter public policy fix meets one part firing the manager of the Cubs.
If Barbara Starr, or Bob Woodward, had broken the NSA leak story, and they had broken it in the exact same way but just in all the right beltway places and with all the right blessings of all the right beltway players, everything would be totally cool in the Village. Hell, if lil' Luke Russert in his crisp new boat shoes, navy blue yacht clubbers jacket, and gleaming white men's capri pants had been the one to do everything by the Glenn Greenwald dance card, why, it would still be totally okay. We would all be looking at a media that was entirely on the same page. Pentagon Papers 2.0 and demands that the Pulitzer people not drop the ball on attaboys on this one. Nobody in the Kewl Kidz Klub would be personally asking Woodward, Starr, or even poor lil' Luke if they should really be in jail, and the crush of those autopsying the personalities involved first would be digging through the pages of data looking for stories of their own to bring them some cheddar from the good cheese. Maybe Snowden would still be the controversial figure that his is now, but certainly the personality on the reporting side wouldn't be nearly as pivotal. Kinsley would be buying Woodward a drink. So would Alter, Sullivan, Goldberg, Hiatt, and Bai.
The intellectual center of a Mr. Michael Kinsley is that if he thinks you are a jerk, or if he finds you to be unserious, or uncouth, or if his friends think you are a jerk, or unserious, or uncouth, then you don't count. We're all equal, it's just that some folks are just more equal than others. You are serious if they think you are serious. Michael Kinsley. Jonathan Alter. Joe Klein. Ron Fournier. Fred Hiatt. Tom Friedman. The late David Broder. Matt Bai. What do they all have in common? Boiled down to their very professional essence, what is the common universal standard? You are as serious, or unserious, as they think of you at this moment. Non-Conservative punditry, and by extension, the non-Conservative conventional wisdom, has been dominated by such voices for decades. They gave us the cult of the eternally swooning towards to running to the fainting couch. The idea that "both parties do everything equally" even while they might angrily claim that they completely reject that standard. For under the 'you are serious/unserious if we say you are' standard, mulligans may be freely applied. America is being slowly bled by bad faith and bad actors, but God Bless And Keep Our Fainting Couch.
In America, in 2014, it is a vastly bigger sin to call a liar a liar than for a liar to actually be one.
Because of this mindset, how negatively or positively conservatives will react to a story that is about them or relates to them is now a co-consideration to the facts behind the story. Because of this reality being baked into the everyday of how our politics is practiced and covered on every level of our society, facts and opinions become blurred easily by those who benefit from there being no facts just differing opinions. It means having to interview a talk radio shock jock alongside a professor who is a climate change expert as if they have the same level of credibility and expertise. It means that a College Republican Intern at the Heritage Foundation and an Economist with a Nobel Prize in Economics can share podiums in a debate on the economy. It means that you cannot confront bad faith as bad faith because the concept of bad faith is treated as if it is a myth, and the raising of the subject or of the instances of it are always unfair partisan attacks. This fundamentally effects every aspect of our lives as citizens of the United States of America in a profoundly negative way. Every single awful thing about why Americans today are not better off than their parents is abetted by the media culture.
If Very UnSerious Person A breaks the story, our betters twist up their faces and furrow their brows and ponder the possibilities of a rogue journalist being deserving of prison time or not, and of journalism itself needing to defer to the Great Bedwetting Overreaching Powers That Be. But. If Very Serious Person B does it, breaks the exact same story with the exact same players and in the exact same way? The story would be the story. No detail would be eclipsed by petty scoresettling. This is Peak Serious. As Very Serious as 'We have to look forward, and not back'.