I think the Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan is a national treasure. There! I said it!
And yet, as I read her column in today's WaPo I just felt...exhausted. Ms. Sullivan's column -- "Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual" -- is accurate and sobering...and feels like it might have been plucked out of my own archives from 16 years ago.
Minus my swears and verbal curlicues, of course.
In other words, another one of the tens of thousands of urgent-but-ultimately impotent editorials that we've all read (and some of us have written) over the decades pleading with the profession of journalism to police itself. Or, absent that, asking that some senior executives, somewhere with actual clout step up and use their power to put a dent in this plague of Both Siderism -- a plague which everyone but the densest hack knows has paved the road along which the deranged Right now marches, but plague against which no one with the power to do so push back with real authority.
Ms. Sullivan correctly cites "two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann" from "back in the dark ages of 2012" writing their book -- “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” -- about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its poisonous effect on American democracy. She goes on to add that, "nearly a decade later" the derangement of the GOP has only gotten worse.
Which is true.
What is also true, but which Ms. Sullivan fails to add, is that during the decade before Ornstein and Mann wrote their book, Liberals were blogging about the metastasizing cancer of Both Siderism in the media every fucking day, and warning as loud as we could that if this went on, sooner or later our democracy would be destroyed from within. That we would end up up exactly where we are now -- with a Republican Party that is openly racist, fascist and increasingly bloodthirsty, and a mainstream press that enables the Right by cowering in its Both Siderist panic room and refusing to see what is unfolding right in front of them.
None of which made much of a difference, although a lot of you have taken it upon yourselves to leap in with both feet on social media whenever you spot some media gasbag trying to gaslight their readers with a spew of Both Siderism. And for that I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Ms. Sullivan also commendably points the Finger of Shame at the offenders' publications (I've chosen not to carry those links into this post because fuck 'em)
“What You’re Doing Is Unprecedented’: McCarthy-Pelosi Feud Boils Over,” read a CNN headline this week.
And...
One writer at Politico called Pelosi’s decision a “gift to McCarthy.” And [Politico's] Playbook tut-tutted the decision as handing Republicans “a legitimate grievance,” thus dooming the holy notion of bipartisanship.
And...
“Both parties have attacked the other as insincere and uninterested in conducting a fair-minded examination,” a Washington Post news story observed.
But Ms. Sullivan never actually names the names of her colleagues whose casual cowardice is abetting Republican sedition. The names of the goofs who very much need to be publicly shunned for doing us all dirty.
For the record, the CNN sinners are Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju.
The Politico offender is Rachael Bade.
Once you drill down through a Tweet... and then a screenshot... and then search for a key phrase from that screenshot you will learn that the Politico Playbook hacks in question are Rachael Bade, Ryan Lizza, Tara Palmeri and Eugene Daniels.
And the goofs right down the hall from Ms. Sullivan at the WaPo who are using that paper's imprimatur to hand the Right ammunition are Marianna Sotomayor, Jacqueline Alemany are Karoun Demirjian.
All of which tells me what I already knew. That despite a decade of Liberal bloggers calling attention to this toxic style of journalism and despite yet another decade -- a post-Ornstein-and-Mann decade -- of slightly more respectable and august personages within the media doing exactly what Liberal bloggers had been doing all along, nothing has fundamentally changed.
What it tells me is that, from well-known names in the media to unknowns looking to make a name, most of them steer what their professional radar tells them is the safest and most reliable course to career advancement -- Both Siderism.
What it tells me is that, at the very top of the corporate media food chain where priorities and preferences are established, promotions are awarded and hiring-and-firing decisions are made, there is nobody home who actually gives a shit about the fact that our democracy is hanging by threads.
And that one political party -- the Republican Party -- is bending every effort to severe those threads once and for all.
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