Glenn,

I think that if Democrats win the White House and maintain control of Congress in 2008, the mainstream Beltway press corps will suddenly become quite critical and adversarial of the government.

They'll say, "see, bloggers, we are now adversarial" but they'll still be repeating right-wing themes, and regurgitating false statements.

Personally, I think we need a change at the top -- the concentrated power of the corporations who employ these pundits and "journalists" have a vested interest in the Republican machine. Until that power is broken, the corruption will continue.

If the Democrats come to power, we'll see an adversarial Beltway press and pundit class, right away. And they'll become awfully proud of their new "independence"

According to the comment linked to below it's a big fan of the Bushies.

http://mediamatters.org/altercation/200703300003#6

Alex O'Neill

(David Gregory, for example, has frequently criticized the White House, and called them on various lies and inconsistencies.)

David Gregory has taken strong positions during press conferences, but I defy you to find a story of his that is nearly as strong. This is part of the disease, IMO. They spar with Tony during the presser, feel like they've done their jobs, and then write (or broadcast) a weak piece. Snow himself has said that while Gregory is tough during the conferences, his reporting is "fair."

[drat. Another thing I hate about this comment interface. I can't go back to the comment without opening another salon window, loading Glenn's site, finding the post, finding the comment so I can do another copy and paste. Glenn, please talk to these people. This LTE style interface is impeding communication.]

The problem is that most people are lazy thinkers. The idea that gets in first with the most is the one they stick with, and it takes a lot to dislodge it.

So how they did get that idea at first? Bush and Cheney implied it over and over again. Their quotations in the media were not followed by a truthful statement "However, there has been no evidence of any link of Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 bombings. NBC News can find no intelligence source who will back up the claim that there is a link."

The administration uses the Big Lie strategy all the time. The media has a responsibility to make that strategy impossible to implement in the United States. In this case they not only permitted the Big Lie to stand, but they also participated in the marginalization of the people who were actually correct, Americans like Scott Ritter and Howard Dean, international experts like Hans Blix.

The media was an active accomplice in peddling lies to the American people. There can be no doubt about that.

Glenn,

While I agree with the spirit of your update, it overlooks one fundamental thing: the facts are partisan. As Steven Colbert says, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." In fact, one of the points made in the book On Bended Knee, is that the press rather rudely discovered an anti-fact bias that got directed at it when it rather ineptly tried to correct Reagan (that didn't last long, as the book notes).

This is a fundamental point, and it ties in with my earlier criticism of the "Goldwater/Reagan" construct of conservatism. One of the fundamental differences between Goldwater and Reagan that I didn't touch on previously was that Goldwater--though an ideologue--was realatively reality-based. No voodoo economics from him.

Reagan marked the dawn of conservatism trying to sell a bright new future, rather than a sober return to past (or eternal) verities, and restraint of passions. He promised, in short, that liberalism's goodies could be delivered by consvative means. It didn't work. It couldn't work. And this required a vast expansion in conservatism's propaganda wing--particularly amongst think tanks such as AEI and Heritage in the early 80s, and the explosion of talk radio after the Fairness Doctrine was axed.

What bloggers want now is a reality-based media. But after 25+ years of "balancing" truth (which is messy and falls all over the floor) vs. lies (in the form of well-organized talking-point-style propaganda, which is bite-sized, chewey and sweet) the media sees this-- quite accurately, in fact as a partisan, even ideological demand. Because a reality-based politics over the past 25 years would have looked nothing at all like the politics we actually had. No Star Wars. No "supply-side economics." No ignoring of AIDs for the first 8 years of the epidemic. No Central American genocide. No de facto creation of al Qaeda in the name of bringing down an "Evil Empire" that was already on the brink of collapse. No militant denial of global warming. Etc., etc., etc.

Where we are agreed is that bloggers aren't asking journalists to slant their news for a partisan or ideological purpose. They are asking them to un-slant the news in favor of realism. But that most definitely would have a potent political and ideological effect, because it would prove fatal the politicals of fantasy and fear on which the conservative movement is based.

http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/03/30/harris_replies/permalink/137173c03aee5b4e53794eb5a858e72c.html

WeikuBoy

Yes, there is a difficulty here in that in the previous incarnation of Glenn's blog, there was a vibrant community of commenters who interacted with each other, rather than posting unmoderated Letters to the Editor. There was actually a great deal of concern expressed that this LTE format would damage that community. We also should have realized that dropping the community into an environment where the current subscribers were used to the LTE format would find the conversational nature of the GG commnunity irritating.

This format doesn't permit a number of things that are consistent with blog commentary rather than electronic LTEs. So we've got the worst of both worlds--low signal to noise ratio for people who want to write and read LTEs and difficulty in maintaining a conversational thread for people who want to make blogging comments.

There could be a similar problem over at King Kaufman's column--there's a fair amount of back and forth there, as is the nature of sports fans--but the volume is low enough that it doesn't matter.

I really think Salon should adopt either a different or an alternative posting method for the daily columns that fits better into the blog comment paradigm.

Oh, and the main thing you complained about--document dumps from other sites without commentary or analysis raises the ire of the blog commenter folks as well.