Letter to a Colleague

I have been having an extended conversation with a media personage whose name I have agreed to keep unsullied.  However since I spent a fair amount of time composing my latest missive (and lost half of it due to a Copy/Paste screw up in Notepad) I'm gonna publish it here and we're all gonna pretend that this is a post.

My (checks notes) 9089th post to be exact.

After which I will remind you that it is my birthday tomorrow and the PayPal tip jar is open!


Norris: Are you attempting to tell me my duties sir?

Marlowe: No just having fun trying to guess what they are.

-- Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

You have covered quite a bit of ground and thanks again for being honest.

First, I agree that there needs to be a candid discussion about whether or not the "Both Sides Do It" paradigm is still defensible as principle, or if it has become a safe-space for lazy hacks and well-paid frauds and a lethal blind-spot in the media which Republicans have been exploiting to wreck havoc on our democracy.

The problem is, it's about 20 years too late.

The Right has gone so completely around the bend -- and have been trained to attack the Liberal Media so reflexively -- that there is nothing to left to discuss with them.  And speaking for all Liberals everywhere, I have nothing left to say to anyone who still feels the need to pretend otherwise.  The period after after the invasion of Iraq was probably the last chance for leaders in the media to lead such a discussion ... and they blew it.  Comprehensively.  Because if we started holding people accountable for the things they said and did during the Bush Administration, golly, who knows where it might end?

Who knows how many members of the Beltway Insiders Club might have to go get honest work?

And so we on the Left once again found ourselves shouting into the abyss as the corporate media circled the wagons and let it all slide.  As the nation's op-ed columns and cable news seats filled up with Bush regime dead-enders whose careers were being aggressively retconned.  As the GOP base was allowed to put on funny hats and pretend to be Tea Party Patriots who had barely even heard of George Bush. 

As basically the entire Bush Administration was bulldozed down the Memory Hole by the only institution with the money and muscle to do it: the corporate media, hiding behind their "principles".

One of my canaries in this mine-shaft has been Bill Kristol who, over the course of a decade or so, managed to hop from ABC News to the NYT to a gig at Time Magazine to Fox News and finally back to ABC where an individual named Jonathan Greenberger (who appeared to leap from "college intern" to "executive producer of 'This Week'" almost overnight) immediately hired Kristol because Mr. Greenberger considered him to be a "brilliant, original thinker" and not a smirking unreconstructed war monger who had become a national punch-line for being wrong about everything.

So whatever the hell was going on at ABC, it had *nothing* to do with principles or journalism.  And to this day, wherever Kristol (or his son-in-law Matthew Continetti) pops up, he is can be 99% certain that none of his colleagues will ever ask him any inconvenient questions about his long, disgraceful past.

This is what we call the "Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks".

Which brings me to Chuck Todd, who is simply awful and about whom I (and many others) have already written more than enough to warrant that judgement.  It's 2019 and the Left has long since proven to have been irrefutably right about the Right all along, so when Mr. Todd contorts himself into a trans-dimensional Gordian knot to continue to play the Both Sides Do It game, is he doing it because NBC pays him a LOT of money to do so, or is it because he believes he is standing on the threadbare remains of some principle?

I am perfectly willing to believe that Mr. Todd justifies himself to himself (and justifies taking the corporate King's shilling) by believing that some principle is at stake, but so what?  Doesn't every villain always have a reason? 

And make no mistake, people like Todd are villains.

However these days I find the most interesting thing about Todd is how many people have forgotten that he was preceded by David Gregory who was just as awful in exactly the same ways that Todd is awful.  This tells me NBC/Comcast executives want to have exactly that sort of person sitting at that table with that logo behind them every Sunday.  Someone who really believes that it is not their job to challenge Republicans when they lie, or even ask a Republican a tough follow-up question.  Someone who will lard their panels with Republican cranks.  Someone who will lend the credibility of MTP to rehabilitate the reputations of scum like Newt Gingrich.

All while pleading that they are doing it for the very highest of principles.

After watching the Right getting exponentially worse these past several decade and watching influential members of the media deal with the rise of American fascism right in front of them by hiding behind an ever-shrinking fig-leaf of "Balance", I am all out of sympathy for the Chuck Todds of the world.  And I'm done hoping that our media is capable of reforming itself.  Instead, like Josephus witnessing the sacking of Jerusalem and trying to save what little he can carry, I feel like I am documenting something which was once great and vital die at the hands of forces beyond my ability to influence in any way.

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