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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (306574)	5/23/2009 8:43:19 PM
From: Tom Clarke	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793782

The dorks of perception 23 May 2009 Back in the day, to use an idiom that would never have been tolerated back in the day, we had reporters: scrappy fellows who knew every trick in the book, every source in the back alley, every button to push to get past the predilections of that one particular editor. There are still a few such out there — I’ve seen some locally, even — but the national scene is dominated, not by reporters, but by journalists, who, says Stacy McCain, are a different breed entirely: To be a journalist in Washington is to live one’s life surrounded by men who have never driven 110 mph, never spent a night in jail, and never won a fight in their lives. The upper echelons of American journalism have become the exclusive monopoly of former teacher’s pets, who as children were never sent to the principal’s office, who as teenagers were never suspended for showing up drunk for chemistry class, who as college students never woke up at 6:30 a.m. on the porch of the ATO house, who never played in a rock band or sold a pound of weed or dove from a 50-foot cliff into an abandoned rock quarry. Washington journalism is like some kind of perverse alternative reality where the Beta males are dominant. And the process, I submit, becomes self-reinforcing after a while, once said Betas discover, to their amazement, that no one is going to challenge them on anything serious: you can lift stuff other people have written, you can even make stuff up, and nobody will say a word. In an atmosphere like this, even Maureen Dowd can get dates. (We will say no more about my semi-legendary Dowd fixation.) What’s dangerous about this, I think, is not so much the idea that dorkiness is gaining a measure of cultural acceptability — hell, I’d benefit from that sort of thing — but the underside of that card, the enshrinement of passive-aggressive behavior as the preferred method of getting things done. For instance, almost the entire Federal bureaucracy now operates on the premise that the states will swallow blatant violations of the Tenth Amendment if they fear the loss of funding; to your Washington journalist, this is simply The Way Things Ought To Be, and it will never occur to him to question it. The idea of reducing the size and scope of government? Not even on the table: like Governor Le Petomane, they worry first about protecting their phoney-baloney jobs. A local TV station uses the slogan “Making A Difference” in their news promotions. Since basically they’re vending the same tired non-stories as their competitors, I have to assume this is intended as motivation for the journalists on staff. The actual reporters on staff don’t pay any attention: they have stories to file. And television’s All Glory to the Anchor setting makes the people doing the scut work into the equivalent of Star Trek redshirts: if you see one, better get the video snapshot, because you may never see him again. dustbury.com