Letters to the Editor

Megan McArdle and Dan Drezner's defense of the media There are people who believe the press should be covering Obama's bowling scores and Monica Lewinsky while ignoring torture, lawbreaking, and the suspension of the Fourth Amendment. Glenn Greenwald [2008-04-08]

• Publiusendures

  I Think You're a Bit Off - I usually agree with you, and most certainly think you're on the side of the angels on torture, telecom amnesty, etc. But I think you're misinterpreting what Drezner and McArdle wrote. Their posts are not normative arguments about what the media "should" cover, but are instead descriptive arguments about what the media actually does cover because that is what Americans care about.

  I understand the distinction you're drawing (though I think it applies much more to what McArdle wrote than Drezner - he clearly was justifying, not just explaining, the coverage), but still have a few points to make about it -

  (1) My original post had nothing to do with whether profit motive and ratings was a key reason why the media behaves this way. So if that's the only point they were making - as you claim - why would they think they were disagreeing with me?

  (2) It doesn't really matter why the political press ignores serious government wrongdoing and focuses on petty and trivial stupidities. The fact that they do so -- and thereby keep the public ignorant and enable government wrongdoing -- is worth mentioning and documenting.

  (3) What you claim is merely descriptive is, in fact, a normative argument. To say that "the press is and should be motivated by ratings, and therefore they should only cover petty stories that people want to hear, not boring stories people don't want to hear" (which is McArdle's, but not Drezner's claim), is to defend the press. It's to say that they are doing what they ought to be doing.

  (4) I specifically critiqued this mindset in my original post, when I explained that these journalists patronizingly claim that the lowly regular Americans don't care about weighty matters and only want to hear vapid trash. But it's a self-fulfilling prophecy -- the media ignores vital stories and thus the public doesn't know about them -- and the claim is also baseless.

  Who says that Americans care more about Obama's bowling than about lawbreaking and torture? The cable news shows that focus almost exclusively on the former aren't exactly great successes. There's this myth that whatever journalists chatter about it what Americans care about. That myth should have been forever dispelled during the Clinton impeachment obsessions.

  -- GlennGreenwald
  [Read GlennGreenwald's other letters]
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