The "Esteemed" 4th Estate

Glenn Greenwald is becoming one of my favorite thinkers these days. He writes a column on Salon.com. In one of his posts today he wrote about something that has long been a big issue for me. That issue is the ease with which some in the media these days are untroubled by people, like Karl Rove, who win by tromping all over the rules. They even cozy up to these very people they are supposed to be "objectively" covering. In their world, Grantland Rice's famous saying that it's not whether one wins or loses that's important, but "how you play the game" is no longer relevant. In their world, winning by whatever means necessary is now viewed as savviness. Anyway here's an exerpt from the post, Boys’ night out: “The Politico guys,” Rove’s top disciple and how our press corps works. Take a look at what he had to say.

"...Yesterday, Digby wrote about the ongoing reverence for Karl Rove from our political and media establishment and, quoting a great new piece by Matt Taibbi on that topic, noted that Rove’s popularity among the media is not in spite of his flagrant contempt for law, ethics and rules, but due precisely to it:

Because this generation of Americans has become so steeped in greed and social Darwinism that it can no longer distinguish between cheating and achieving, between enterprise and crime, and can’t bring itself to criticize winners any more than it knows how to be nice to losers.

That echoes what NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen observed last year about the media’s ongoing reverence for Rove himself and his band of disciples — that the modern journalist, above all else, reveres and desperately wants to be close to the ”unprincipled winner”: those who engage in bad acts, ones which everyone knows are bad, and — most importantly of all — gets away with it through flagrant indifference to law and rules:

Savviness! Deep down, that’s what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in— their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including operators like Karl Rove.) In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane.

Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political—is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain.… What is the truest mark of savviness? Winning, of course! Everyone knows that the press admires an unprincipled winner."

To read the full article click here Boys’ night out: “The Politico guys,” Rove’s top disciple and how our press corps works.