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Disclaimer: I am talking about the national political press, NOT the New Hampshire press.
I've had a diary like this in my back pocket for about a month. It's necessary to retrace my thinking on it a little bit.
I was thinking about Barack's Germany trip, and I read how Andrea Mitchell, presumably among others, was complaining about lack of access to the candidate. Some of that is the logical shift from candidate to presumptive nominee, but the implication was, the press was being managed more. The staginess had kicked up a notch. So I had this thought that the campaign, which had in some ways campaigned beyond the primary toward the general, was now campaigning beyond the general to the administration. That struck me as a dangerous strategy.
At about the same time, I read a piece by the estimable Eric Alterman, the premise of which was this: some of the best minds in America are trying to solve the problem of declining newspaper readership, because newspapers are the primary information source in our democracy, and hence one of the primary engines of our democracy. But, among the greatest enemies of the industry are the new crop of owners. One newly minted executive at a LARGE paper had to have it explained to him that a dateline of Lebanon, say, meant the paper had a reporter in Lebanon.
So flash forward a few months, and Barack wins, but the press hates him. I don't want that. Suppose all the press bashing the grassroots activists do filters up. And years go by, and the Democratic Party reaches a state where the GOP stands now: one of our leaders can literally deny something in a major news organ -- say, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal -- and the base doesn't care. Then the republic has a problem. Everything is "just partisanship," there is no objective source of truth.
I was trying to reconcile all this, and trying to compose some coherent sentences on it without sounding like a ninny, and then I had a completely different thought:
To hell with the press.
The rightful role of the press is a watchdog. The press SHOULD hate and fear the government - even if the government is us, which I certainly hope is the case in a few months. So, if the Democratic Party is better, let us prove it, because the default setting of a reporter should be to mistrust us, to be suspicious of anyone who would presume to lead us.
Anyway, that was last month. Now the convention is closer, and I'm looking forward to the big show and pretty much back to being a ninny. What do you think?
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