View From a Height

The Great One Pouts

Although not necessarily without cause.

Hugh Hewitt is upset. He's upset that the general blogospheric reaction to the Memogate report is positive. He's upset because Thornburgh got as far as showing a possible connection between CBS and the Kerry campaign, and a possible connection between CBS and the Democratic Party, and then stopped at the gates. The analogy he draws is to Ben Bradlee urging on his boys to break down the White House gates.

Now, some would note a certain irony in Hugh's asking the blogosphere to behave as the WaPo did in the defining events of the MSM as we know it. I think it's actually pretty apt. Watergate was a problem, and the public did have a right to know whether the President was subverting the political process. Just as now, the public has a right to know whether one of the major networks, the Tiffany Network, the Pajama Network, was acting to subvert the political process.

That Hugh sees this is a net plus rather than a risk is a result of his faith in the blogosphere as the distributed, collective wisdom of the people, rather than wisdom concentrated and dispensed by the elites. It's a sound, although not infallible instinct. Still, the odds of finding yourself being rolled through the streets in tumbrils are slightly lessened if you don't act like Louis XVI in the first place.

So why is the blogosphere acting like satisfied dolphins rather than energized sharks? One reason is that this election was both nasty enough and decisive enough to return politics to normal, and nobody want to refight it. Secondly, Kerry lost.

The former is a red herring. Nobody is asking anyone to refight the election. The latter is also a red herring. Kerry lost, but the detritus of his campaign, and that of the DNC, is all around us, and some of it could end up at the helm of the Democratic Party. It'd be helpful to know what sort of people they are.

Still, in the couple of cases so far of campaign or government collusion with media old or new, it's the media that gets hung out to dry. Jon Lauck and Armstrong Williams are derided, not the John Thune or the Ed. Dept. lackey who let the contract.

So the real target can only be CBS. But heads did roll. Also there's a sense that the points have been either proven or conceded, and that CBS News is already a synonym for Mickey Mouse, with apologies to ABC.

So let's follow Hugh's comparison to the Reformation. The Church's initial reaction to the debate was to flail, excommunicate people, and basically try to exercise power that it no longer had. They had been talking to each other too long even to realize that anyone else existed. Eventually, the cardinals did absorb the lessons, root out the worst of the corruption, and learn to confine itself to spiritual matters, rather than artistic, monetary, and carnal ones.

In the long run, networks that are dysfunctional and irrelevant become confirmed in their irresponsibility. Perhaps the only way that CBS will ever accept the truth about itself, and serve as an example to the others, is if it's forced to look at the portrait in its attic long and hard, warts and all. Otherwise, it's only going to get worse.