The press and the new order. If you scroll down through the comments that follow Jay Rosen's post about Gannongate and the Bush/Rove decertifying of the media, you'll find Jay engaged at a number of points with his readers. In one of those exchanges, Rosen speaks a bit more forcefully than in the main post about how the White House-media struggle has been joined, and why the institutional press are currently losing it; the comment is worth highlighting for readers who don't persist that far on the page:

Among Bush's many talents he has a sense for who's weak. Rove has more than a sense; he builds strategy (and theory, which informs the strategy) on it. But they come together very well in assessing weakness.

They saw a weak adversary in the White House press, which cannot fight back in most cases without appearing to be drawn into a partisan struggle, a step that instantly erodes its authority and one that mainstream news organizations are extremely reluctant to take.

It's an odd feature of the PressThink discussion—one that goes to what I think of as the somewhat compromised position that a commentator like Rosen, with his multiple implications in the blog-journalism ecosystem, occupies—that there's a kind of throwing-up of hands when it comes to following through on the necessary implications of this point. The Aftermatter section of Jay's post ends in an aporia typical of Rosen's commentary, at once forthright but also (not deliberately, I think) obscurantist. He offers a helpful condensation of his own work on the decertification subject, and concludes:

Finally, Bloggers Are Missing in Action as Ketchum Tests the Conscience of PR described the falsification of journalism by means of a public relations firm, Ketchum, favored by the Bush Administration with $97 million in contracts, one of which went to conservative columnist Armstrong Williams.

Now the trail has led to Jeff Gannon, and In the Press Room of the White House that is Post Press. As far as I'm concerned, it is all one story. But I do not pretend to understand it yet.

Is it really that difficult to understand? Or is it that Rosen's tendency to want to celebrate "post-press" as a wide-open moment of possibility for a de-centered, or re-centered journalism (the tendency that led him to function as an enabler in the Eason Jordan witch hunt) makes the evident hard to see? Since it's practically staring Jay in the face here.

In a follow-on to this post (yeah, I know, another one!) I want to unpack that term "post-press," and take a stab at undersanding why, structurally, our institutional press is in this particular state of weakness at this particular moment. (What makes this press, as opposed to the press of, say, eight years ago, uniquely vulnerable to having its authority eroded by the appearance of being drawn into partisan struggle?) But for now let's just stipulate it. What opportunity does this weakened state of the institutional media present to Rove's GOP?

Rosen's term "decertify" is very aptly chosen: compare it with the parallel "de-legitimize," for instance. The point is that the professional position is under assault, the idea that there is or can be a professional, disinterested practice of journalism. I think it's hard to overstate what an epochal assault that is. What we're looking at, in fact, is nothing less than an attempt to overthrow what has been a mostly stable American constitutional settlement of more than fifty years' duration.

Perhaps not "overthrow": that constitutional settlement is already broken, and the contest now is over what takes its place. The professionalization of journalism, the elevation of the press into an independent actor outside-but-not-outside the state, a Fourth Estate, is a defining feature of the post-World War II American governing consensus. (It's hard to recognize, at this distance, just how much the presence of the press within that governing consensus represented at the time a constitutional innovation. One might consider the Supreme Court decision in NY Times v. Sullivan as the locus classicus for the full recognition of that innovation within the constitutional system.) Allowed more or less wide critical latitude, within the bounds established by Cold War bipartisanship, the national media played a role that we've long since taken for granted, even mythologized as a fundamental and natural aspect of the working of a liberal democratic society. (This was the real "liberal media": not the liberal media of conservative myth, not liberal in adherence to a political tendency, but in its allegiance to the broad post-New Deal consensus, one that bought conservative tolerance for the maintenance of a modest welfare state with a platform of anti-Communist internationalism and official suspicion of organized labor.)

What does Karl Rove want to make out of the ruins of this broken consensus? Or, better, what does Rupert Murdoch want to make out of it? To ask that question is to answer it. A single trajectory unites Fox News, "Karen Ryan," Armstrong Williams, and "Jeff Gannon." The right is buying itself a sham press, one entirely under ideological control, and intends to put in place a new constitutional order, a parody really of the old postwar one, in which any remaining "neutral" institutional press does business under the effective supervision of the rightist-affiliated and all but openly government-sponsored "press." ("Jeff Gannon" was in the White House press room exactly to fill that supervisory function, even to be seen to fill it.) That dominance, and that sponsorship, will be established as a permanent feature of a political regime allowing minimal opportunity for organized, articulate dissent. The aim, in other words, isn't simply to "decertify" professional journalism: it is to create a new structure of press legitimacy, one based on the (limited) sufferance of the state power, in which the major media become a more or less coordinated arm of the GOP propaganda machine.

This new constitutional landscape is coalescing all around us; it only takes eyes to see it. This article by Robert Parry, for instance, has eyes, and uses them to pick out the shape of what he calls "managed democracy," and I call electoral dictatorship, now looming in our future. (Thanks to Billmon for the link. Billmon, in his own inimitable mode, is seeing it, too.) To return to PressThink for a moment: the sad thing is that Jay Rosen is too implicated in the Eason Jordan blogstorm (however hedged his position) to complete his thought here, to recognize that the Jordan affair represents a significant moment in the very process that his post on Gannongate almost clearly sees, and not quite forthrightly enough decries.

posted by michael  10:34:11 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

I've been mulling over Jay Rosen's Gannongate post at Press Think for almost a week (a blog eternity); today's article by Eric Boehlert in Salon ("Tearing down the press"), which covers much the same territory, but permits itself a more direct expression of outrage over the Bush administration's press strategy, finally crystallized my desire to write in response to Rosen—or, not so much in response as within and around the problematic he articulates.

Rosen assimilates the Gannon scandal to a critique he's been developing for a while now, about the Bush/Rove desire to, as Rosen puts it, decertify the institutional press. Here's the core of his argument:

Before the certification of "Jeff Gannon" as a White House reporter who was good to go there was the Bush Administration's de-certification move against the Washington press, which it felt had to go. These two things are deeply related.

The idea that joins them was stated by Andrew Card, Bush’s chief of staff: "They don’t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election," said Card. "I don’t believe you have a check-and-balance function.” ...

"Jeff Gannon" (really James Dale Guckert) can be thought of as the replacement press, a fake journalist with a fake name working for a fake news organization, asking fake questions at a real press event. ... Creating "Jeff Gannon" as a credible White House correspondent, and creating radical doubt about the intentions of mainstream journalists (in order to de-certify the traditional press) are two parts of the same effort, which stretches beyond the Bush team itself to allies in Republican Party politics, and new actors like Sinclair Broadcasting, or FreeRepublic.com, or Hugh Hewitt, or these guys.

The first thing to say is, this is a welcome discussion; as is the focused and intense debate joined in the comments below the post, which themselves are worth taking time over. It's a pleasure to see that the wider dimension of the Gannon story isn't lost on Rosen, since it seems to have eluded so many other press critics. The second thing to say follows, which is that I owe Jay an apology for a comment of my own, made at the time I complained about his coverage of the Eason Jordan flap, to the effect that he might be expected, when he at last turned his attention to Gannongate, to follow the path of crypto-rightist Jeff Jarvis by playing it as centrally about the bad behavior of lefty mobs and "the politics of personal destruction." I let my irritation get the better of me, and I was aware even at the time that was a presumptively unfair comment; Rosen is much smarter and much more honest than that.

Past that, there's a particular line of discussion I want to take up concerning the issues Jay raises in his post, and the ones he almost-but-not-quite raises; and that's turning into a fairly extended essay on its own. So I'll put this bit up now, and follow on somewhat later with the meat of what I want to say, because I don't want that getting obscured (and unread) by its having to live either after a jump or toward the bottom of an overlong scrolldown. Jay doesn't mind that sort of thing, but he has enough of a position that he can presume on his reader's patience more than I can, I think.

posted by michael  12:49:00 PM  
tell me about it []