After laying dead at the side of the road for a full three years, there’s a glimmer of resurgence in the corporate national media—but just a glimmer. The function of a national media—both corporate and independent—is to focus the country’s attention on the main issues of the day. Untortunately, the independent media can serve as the canary in the cultural coal mine—pointing out the important trends and stories—but little more. It’s the corporate media that has to focus the nation’s attention with laser-like percision on the issues of the day. For three the independent media (disclosure: I’m an employee of a national independent magazine) has been serving their function, but the national corporate media have been asleep at the wheel, collectively dropping the editorial ball and looked the other way as it was kicked to the gutter.
Investigative journalism is hard and expensive. It’s going to be a while, if ever, before the blogosphere can support this kind of necessary endeavor. For the near term, at least, the national corporate media has to get back on its collective feet and get back in the game.
But there are glimmers here and there that this is starting to happen. Like for instance Frank Rich’s editorial in today’s New York Times. Writing that the war on Iraq is over, and someone needs to tell the president, Rich points out that President Bush’s approval rating for his handling of Iraq is currently 34%.
More importantly, Rich begins to peal away the surface of Plamegate and starts asking the questions the national corprorate media should have asked three years ago: what did the President know about the bogus information used to justify war and when did he know it:
“The president’s cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill O’Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is chiding Mr. O’Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped expose the administration’s prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.‘s. (On this sinking ship, it’s hard to know which rat to root for.)”
Pointing to Bush’s Cincinnati speech of 7 October 2002, Rich starts the drumbeat that will hopefully revive the national corporate media: “The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths, and hype.”
And it just gets better….
Welcome back to the game, guys.
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