The Press vs. the Government

H.L. Mencken once said: “The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down. “

He had the right of it. Fewer things make me want to barf more than when I hear some toady Right-Wing Water-Carrier complain that the the “press isn’t supporting our President.”

Well, guess what, bucko? If you really think the job of the press is to support the government, then you would have been really happy reading Pravda or Izvestiya in the days of the Soviet Union. Those newspapers existed to support the State, which is why when the rest of the world knew that something bad was happening in the USSR, the Soviet media was publishing trenchant stories about improved crop harvests in the Ukraine.

The relationship between the press and the government in a free society, at all levels, has to be adversarial from the point of view of the press. The job of the press is to tell us, the voters, what is truly going on, not to tell us what some public relations flackazoid in the government wants us to know what is going on. The job of the press is to go around kicking over rocks, to shine bright lights into the dark corners of government and to see what is going on.

One of the worst examples of the American press not doing its job has to be in the early years of the Iraq War. A few months before the war started, the movie “Chicago” was in the theaters. One of the scenes in the movie was Billy Flynn, the defense lawyer, singing the “Press Conference Rag”. At one point in that scene, Billy Flynn is seen to be the puppet master working the strings to the marionettes in the press. When I saw Chimpy’s press conference before the war started, the similarity was eerie. The questions were all softballs that Our Retard-In-Chief could hit out of the park. The press fell down on the job, the various spinmeisters in the Administration fed them bullshit on a shingle and the press just ate that shit up.

The press fulfills its job under our Constitution when it goes after the stories that the government does not want us to know, when they expose the spin, the lies, the corruption. If the job of the press is to support the government, then we don’t need a First Amendment, for no government in history felt any restriction on its right to “catapult the propaganda.”

Without a free press, all we would have would be variations of Pravda, Izvestiya and Fox Noise. Democracy depends on an informed population. Without a free and aggressive press, democracy withers and dies.

Our Founding Fathers knew that. Too bad the Republicans do not.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." H.L. Mencken.

It is the job of the press to point out that the hobgoblins are not real. Failing to do that is, in essence, betraying the trust of the Founding Fathers.