The Fawning Press

Trey Smith

The book is so one-sided that it is almost supernaturally dull, and I was forgetting about it just minutes after I put it down.

Then it hit me – it was an interesting book, after all! Because if you read All In carefully, the book's tone will remind you of pretty much any other authorized bio of any major figure in business or politics (particularly in business), and it will most particularly remind you of almost any Time or Newsweek famous-statesperson profile.

Which means: it's impossible to tell the difference between the tone of a reporter who we now know was literally sucking the dick of her subject and the tone of just about any other modern American reporter who is given access to a powerful person for a biography or feature-length profile.
~ from One Interesting Thing About Paula Broadwell's Petraeus Biography by Matt Taibbi ~

Utilizing his typical streey-savvy prose, Taibbi points out where mainstream journalism has gone off the rails. Reporters have become sycophants of the powerful people they cover!

The mainstream press defends itself by claiming that access to the rich and powerful is what forces this behavior. If denied inner access, they claim, they would be hard-pressed to report the "news" of the day. So, they are forced by circumstances to become lapdogs.

It is an inane argument! What it really exposes for all the world to see is that, by and large, mainstream journalists have grown lazy. They don't want to do the legwork necessary to investigate much of anything. It's so much easier to schmooze with government and corporate leaders who then spoon-feed the press propaganda masquerading as unmitigated objective facts. Why do a bunch of research and interview countless individuals when you can be handed a pre-written story -- what used to be called a press release -- to attach your name to?

In the olden days -- though there have ALWAYS been reporters who have acted as the mouthpiece of the powerful -- journalists worked to keep a distance from those they covered. They saw their role as being adversaries to the rich and powerful. Anything that was derived from the powerful was distrusted and not reported as fact until it could be verified three or four times over.

With few exceptions, those days have come and gone. Democracy has suffered greatly as a result.