Apologia pro mainstream media

A death-bed has scarcely a history; it is a tedious decline, with seasons of rallying and seasons of falling back; and since the end is foreseen, or what is called a matter of time, it has little interest for the reader, especially if he has a kind heart.

Jamelle Bouie at The American Prospect is not pleased with the Times sucking up to Mike Bloomberg (via this). Naturally, he is offended.

Not to repeat myself too much, but this "centrist" hackery is little more than a thinly veiled contempt for democracy.

He goes on to knock "Beltway chatterers" and to wonder how an independent Bloomberg presidency would "pass legislation," an unintentionally if accurately scatological phrasing.

It calls to mind any number of Progressive/Liberal screeds against David Broder et al., in which it is always presumed that these mainstream media types who long for a bipartisan, or nonpartisan, daddy have had their brains rotted out by staring too long into the bright morning star of official power. They don't know what they're talking about! The Republicans are irrational, will never compromise! Legitimate disagreement! Factionalism as the rootstock of democracy! Et cetera!

Now the public media is maintained at the periphery of real power, not at its heart. Obviously you can't tell a bunch of loudmouthed Blitzers what is really going on; they are too vain and too naturally locquacious to keep a goddamn secret; they will blab that shit all over town. (You can by the way ignore any protestations to the opposite; for example, about the propriety of the wikileaks leaks. That's just professional jealousy and backbiting. Geraldo revealed troop positions on Fox News. If some disgruntled state dept. employee leaked that shit to Margaret Carlson, she'd be on your teevee five minutes later to reveal the "dramatic revelations.") Mainstream journalists are given just enough access and just enough information to keep them manipulable and, in turn, to manipulate public sentiment. And yet--this is the important point--the child at the door still hears some of what goes on in the bedroom, even if it mostly just bewilders and confuses him.

What reporters correctly perceive is that behind the veil of partisan skirmishing, there is a permanent ruling class, an oligarchic set of institutions with a common, governing viewpoint. And that is not to say that every individual in government and finance and so on operates in lock step or that there are never palace intrigues, nor even that factionalism doesn't to some extent exist. It is, however, to say that in the privacy of their own social class, these people are peers with a shared outlook. Media types, who have some access to this world, see this, and so they wonder: why do they fight? Powerful Democrats and powerful Republicans actually do seem to David Broder and Richard Cohen to agree in principle on many things. It is David Broder, not Jamelle Bouie or Duncan Black or the permanently disabled empathophiles at Shakespeare's Sister or the stable of Nation bloggers, who sees and understands more clearly. Of course, the "bipartisan" government that Beltway gossips pine for already exists.

The actual rulers of this country understand the value of apparently intractible partisan battling. It distracts from what they are actually doing, or, when what they're doing becomes so patently obvious that even Digby's Hullabaloo can figure it out, it allows blame to fall on some or other disposable elected party. Washington is full of dim-bulb Senators and freshman House reps to keep this sort of thing going, and the media are obliged to report and credit it, even though, on occasion, their befuddlement breaks through as they wonder why the lords can't just dispense with the pretense of disagreement and embrace their obvious noblesse.