Letters to the Editor
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An 18th Century Press?
Greenwald's column confirms my own judgement of political reporting in the American mainstream media, which I find resembles in its deference the kind of reportage that was done for the most eminent political journals and newspapers in the 18th century. These publications were highly valued for their access to government officials, but in return they had to exclude anything critical of those officials or their governments. In time this approach was seen as not necessary and so was abandoned in Western Europe as it was in the US, so the question arises as to why American journalists have returned to this approach. A comparison of media ownership patterns in Western Europe and the US would probably yield an answer.
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Secrecy and the "Favor" of the Pending Reporter Shield Law
I think this might be a good time to point out that Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter think that just such atrocious, secrets-protecting American journalistic behavior needs to be rewarded with a federal "reporter shield law" that would grant the corporate employers of these power-serving reporters permission to ignore federal grand jury subpoenas [which are (very rarely) issued only after a painstaking approval process that is mandated by DOJ guidelines whenever reporters are to be questioned]. An exclusion from compelled testimony, to which the rest of us are subject, that would make the "reporters" for Murdoch's Newscorp and GE's NBC, et al, a special, immune class of citizen whenever federal crimes are under investigation, about which they have some pertinent knowledge. In particular, of course, in investigations of crimes committed by those covered by the national media - the legions of powerful, connected insiders in our federal government who like to abuse their positions by selectively leaking their knowledge gained as a public servant, in pursuit of bad faith political and partisan ends, to 'friendlies' in the media with anonymous impunity.
This is, I believe, a case where the First Amendment is successfully wielded as an unimpeachable, 'politically-correct' justification for such a federal shield law, without regard for the underlying modern realities of the corporate ownership of our "free press" and thus the dangerous power such a shield law would grant to extremely irresponsible, self-serving, private-agenda-promoting corporate ownership that is so often secretly allied with those holding public office [with its access to mountains of (improperly) classified information that's not available to the public at large; information which can - with the help of irresponsible reporters like Judy Miller and Robert Novak - be selectively leaked in misleading ways without easy rebuttal, a uniquely federal-level scenario not available to state government leakers].
Adding insult to injury, Leahy and Specter (with their shield law already passed out of the Judiciary Committee), issued a joint letter (as posted on Specter's website) to Senators Reid and McConnell, on March 6 this year - the one-year anniversary of Scooter Libby's conviction - to push for floor action on their proposed shield law, a measure which has been publicly opposed by Patrick Fitzgerald, among others. Timed, in effect (if perhaps advertently), to use the poster-child case for why reporters should not be given such special treatment, and unquestioning benefit of the doubt, to promote a measure, which, if passed, I think we will come to regret almost as much as the extremely destructive consolidation of the media that Bill Clinton and Company helped unleash - the real-world effects of which Glenn's post illustrates so well.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/03/AR2007100302000.html
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more on Prime Minister's Questions
Just look at the difference, and think of how beautiful it would be for the US to have a similar thing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/82556.stm
Prime Minister's Questions or 'PMQs' is a high point of the parliamentary week.
Each week on Wednesday afternoon the prime minister must come to the House of Commons to answer oral questions for half an hour.
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Prime Minister's Questions follows a different format to those of questions to other ministers. MPs do not normally give the prime minister prior notice of the subject which they are going to raise.
This element of surprise allows opposition MPs, in particular, to try to catch the prime minister out with an awkward question. The prime minister must respond without delay, thinking on his or her feet.
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The chance to ask the prime minister a question is highly prized. The names of the MPs who will get the chance to ask the prime minister a question are drawn in a weekly lottery.
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A Result of Current Practices
Or, arguably, "The Result"
Since the mid-1980s, Americans have become increasingly skeptical of what they see, hear, and read in the media, and almost no major news outlet has escaped this trend. For many media outlets there has been little change in public evaluations in the last four years, but ratings for some continue to inch downward.
As a consequence, there is far less variance in public views of the credibility of major news organizations than in the late 1990s. Some of the sources that were viewed as the most credible then have seen their numbers fall substantially, and today no news organization stands out from the crowd as a significantly more reliable source of information.
Changing public views of CNN perhaps best exemplify these trends. In 1998, 42% of those familiar enough with CNN to rate the network said they believed all or most of what CNN reported, significantly more than for any broadcast or cable news outlet tested. Today, just 28% give CNN the highest believability rating, a share which is statistically indistinguishable from most other television news sources.
Other TV news sources, such as 60 Minutes, C-SPAN, and local news stations, have seen similar declines in credibility over the past decade and no longer stand apart as significantly more reliable than other sources.
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=1069
So over the past 20 years the american public has (logically, sensibly) become more and more skeptical of, suspicious of, the news media.
But how can the news media sustain this harmful (to them) trend? How can they continue their poor practices without some kind of "pain" (for lack of a better word) that would force a change in those practices? Even many single-celled organisms respond to external stimuli--why can't the news media? (only partially rhetorical)