The Fat and Happy Elites

Not just Republicans, but really the mainstream media, happy with the status quo and access to the halls of power, they aren't doing their job. A press that does its job, that is at least part of what we are fighting for. Greenwald has it right on the money in this post which I quote in part:

This overt assault on press freedoms internationally is consistent with the administration's incremental attacks on the American media domestically -- attacks which have been met with virtual silence from most of the national media. In that regard, perhaps this exchange is the most revealing part of the latest AP article:


Rosemary Goudreau, editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune, asked AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll what papers like hers could do.

"You run an editorial page, as I recall," Carroll said.


Just as astonishing as the Bush administration's attack on the work of journalists is the almost total acquiescence of the American media to those attacks -- so much so that AP is forced to explicitly beg their fellow journalists to editorialize against the administration's lawless and dangerous detention of one of its journalists. If -- as has been the case to an astonishing extent -- American journalists are unwilling to defend their press freedoms, who is going to?

What we are fighting for? How about for starters a press that takes its job seriously, a meaningful opposition, a press that gives a shit. It is shocking that the story told in the quote is not only not bigger news, but isn't news at all. Until the media elite starts acting more like journalists and less like fat cat prognosticators, we are fighting an uphill battle. And the story that Greenwald tells of the AP photojournalist is scary not just because it is true, but because it is in all likelihood just the tip of the iceberg.