The press and the new order, again. Jay Rosen takes another stab this morning at thinking his way through what he calls the "de-certifying" of the press in the Bush/Rove era. Here's the core of the post:

"It's been apparent since the day he took office... that George Bush has little love for the press," [Howard] Kurtz writes. But what wasn't apparent, at first, was the different philosophy of press relations the Bush White House held, and advertised that it held. Why have a different theory, why talk openly about it, if you intend no changes in practice?

There is no Fourth Estate, says the Bush Thesis. The White House press has no check and balance function. As for journalists, "they don't represent the public any more than other people do," according to Chief of Staff Andrew Card. "In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election."

Of course the whole idea of having a White House press corps is that the reporters in it do represent the American public's common interest in seeing executive power questioned, monitored, examined, explained. The President needs an interlocutor, it was thought.

Keep in mind how often it has been observed that the British have the ritual of Question Time in Parliament--where the Prime Minister must answer the opposition-- while the U.S. has the White House press conference to serve a roughly similar goal. Maybe it doesn't serve very well, but on the other hand if the press does not have an accepted right to question time with the President, who does?

This is the most disturbing part of the entire pattern: To answer questions from informed people who might doubt him is not an essential responsibility that Bush, as President, feels he even has.

The reference to Question Time is helpful: it grounds what I meant in my Wednesday post on this topic, when I talked about a change being under way that redefines the constitutional position of the press. The interlocutory function of the White House press is, obviously, unspecified and unimagined in the text of the Constitution: but the White House press conference represents an enactment, a practical interpretation (one of the most visible and significant of the past era), of the meaning of the First Amendment guarantee of press freedom—and its association of the freedoms of conscience with the right to seek redress from the government. Understanding this aspect of the issue is crucial if you're going to form theory about it.

What Jay Rosen isn't seeing—what isn't being seen generally yet, which is why I'm repeating myself here—is that one constitutional order doesn't pass away without another taking its place. Rosen is focused entirely on the negative moment of the "de-certifying" of the press, which he approaches as a kind of distressing mystery. That's an artifact of a weak theoretical foundation.

Bush doesn't simply refuse to hold the press conferences his predecessors held. His press secretaries don't simply practice a global obfuscation that renders their daily briefings exercises in futility. Bush takes questions from a "Jeff Gannon." His administration suborns "professional" journalists, like Armstrong Williams, to create propaganda for its programs. It broadcasts its messages, all but unedited, through the cheerleading medium of a Fox or a "Talon" News. The institutional, "objective" press is not simply being de-certified. A parallel press, one with a rigid ideological mission, is being set up against it, and drawn into an ever tighter governmental embrace. This controlled press, funded through the deep (and still half-secret) financial networks of the Right, ideologically coordinated through its "scholarly" institutions, staffed by "professionals" schooled less in journalism than in the disinformation tactics of public relations, has now become an arm of Republican government. It is already in a position, with its extension into the blogspace—as the muscle-flexings of Rathergate and the Eason Jordan affair have demonstrated—to exert a powerful disciplinary pressure against the as-yet unaffiliated, neutral press. Indeed, that's now the primary job of the controlled press, to beat the uncontrolled press into submission. This is a movement that clearly marks, and is clearly intended to establish, a deep change in the constitutional relation between the Executive and the press, and with it the social means of opinion formation as a whole.

We are emerging into a new constitutional era, the era of the controlled press. Will any of the professional journalists who still believe they work in the former era manage to figure this out before they're finally ushered into history?

posted by michael  9:31:32 AM  
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