It used to the the case that the press was a watchdog on abuse of government power. Probably the most memorable instance of this for people of my generation was that very same Washington Post in its intense and often breathless coverage of Watergate. The coverage had its political slant to be sure, but in the end it performed perhaps the most valuable function the press in a democratic country can do: It exposed the corrupt and illicit use of government agencies — agencies with enormous power that we’re supposed to be able to trust. Agencies like the FBI. Agencies like the Justice Department.
The Russiagate hoax turned all that inside-out. Instead of exposing the FBI’s and DOJ’s political slanting, manipulation and outright lying (remember the FBI lawyer who altered a document he submitted to the FISA court?), the press was its co-conspirator, its catalyst and its bullhorn.
Where are the alarm bells? A skeptical, nosy, persistent — and independent — press is democracy’s first line of defense against an abusive government. But the press we have now has effectively become not the investigator but the arm of an abusive government. It does this probably less by what it says (although that too) than by what it omits. And the omissions are more insidious, since by definition they are the things you are kept from seeing.
[I have begun calling it the Protection Racket Media for that reason. Thanks to its involvement in the government’s overt and covert efforts to censor speech — even news-media reporting — it might be more accurate to borrow from George Orwell and call them the Ministry of Truth, in the same spirit as Orwell intended. — Ed]
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