[Dean's World] Celia Farber: Press Darlings, We Depress

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Celia Farber:
Press Darlings, We Depress
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1203655551.shtml


   I am watching Charlie Rose--a show discussing the New York Times
   McCain story. It's McCain's campaign manager, Charlie Black, Franklin
   Foer, editor of The New Republic, and Michael Isikiff, of Newsweek.

   The only decent person is Charlie Black. Foer is a complete pod, eyes
   darting, stunningly inarticulate and unable to explain he thinks, but
   maintaining that odious vibe all TNR editors affect that they are the
   hall monitors of journalistic ethics, despite repeated debacles from
   the Huntington affair to Steven Glass to today's TNR wunderkind, the
   perfectly heinous Jamie Kirchik, (whose revent NY Post drivel about
   South Africa makes one wish not to have been born.)

   Isikoff is a bit more human and alive. He can speak, however
   haltingly, and one can detect values beneath the strange media skin
   these guys all have. They can't complete a sentence without saying
   "ah" about 22 times. Remember the word "POD" because I am going to
   return to it in a future post.

   God they are such bastards.

   I can't believe this. I listen to these guys talk about this vaporous
   article you couldn't pay me to slog through about the finer emotions
   of McCain staffers one decade ago, not one with enough cajones to
   speak on the record, and I simply can't believe my ears. I must be
   missing something.

   I am not even thinking about McCain per se or the "allegations" per se
   but of this ghastly apparatus we are all held hostage by called "the
   media." It is worse than the security apparatuses of former communist
   dictatorships in the sense that it postures as good, not evil.

   It is pure evil.

   I look at these guys on TV and I am prepared to say that they are the
   very embodiment of the banality of evil. The smugness, the
   medoiocrity, the arrogance, the unearned power, the total void of
   values, of standing for anything except the right to chew and chisel
   away like little rodents at everything that lives.

   Why must these people be part of our consciousness? Who have you ever
   met in 50 years who reads either Newsweek or TNR?

   Only Charlie Rose....who is now breathlessly interviewing...Samantha
   Powers.

   How very rad.