My WorldNetDaily Colum today, “The ‘Presstitutes’ Vs. The VP,” elaborates on this post. Append your comments to this entry.
No wonder the [media] went crazy after learning of the shooting accident from a Texas paper…Cheney is telling the men and women assigned to cover the White House that they are irrelevant.
With these vainglorious and vapid words, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek excused his colleagues’ latest mindless fit of pique. For over a week now we’ve been subjected to media grand mals over Cheney’s accident. Or, rather, over the delay and circuitous way in which they found out about the shooting.
As longtime readers of this space know, I’m no fan of the Vice President or his boss. I’m even less enamored of the media, liberal and illiberal. They are, for the most, enablers of power. So long as they’re being treated as the demigods they think they are, they act like lap dogs to the Big Dogs. Did not the “presstitutes” enable the invaders of Iraq? You bet they did.
Members of mainstream media have no allegiance to the truth; only to their perches. Alter openly admits that Cheney and his handlers messed with his colleagues’ (read: ME, ME, ME) collective sense of importance by releasing the information to a local newspaper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.
This is not to say the incident was handled efficiently or even forthrightly. What I’m saying is that this private tragedy is almost immaterial in the grand scheme of things—Iraq, the debt, Darfur, and the Islamic conniption over the Danish cartoons, which the bums failed to publish or process.
Any half-wit with a vaguely normal range of affect, moreover, has to know that Cheney’s mishap, not uncommon among hunters (our shooting instructor, who lives to popularize guns, told us he never goes hunting and advised the same), must have devastated all involved, including the VP.
Alter added this patronizing bit of pomposity:
The media often focus on relatively unimportant, easy-to-understand stories as metaphors for shortcomings that the normal conventions of the business (and the inattentiveness of the audience) make hard to convey.
Oh, the condescension!
Yes, the sages who slept with their sources at the onset of the extravaganza known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”; the same sorts who subjected their readers and viewers to a perspective as monochromatic as the green of night-vision optics, and who regularly privilege spectacle over substance—these stellar reporters are now, for our benefit, focusing their powers of observation on the symbolism of the accident.
Fiddlesticks! The media have not concentrated on this story as a service to the public or to the truth. Their coverage of the accidental shooting of Harry Whittington has been entirely self-referential and self reverential. This is about them, not Cheney.
I can think of many material, not metaphoric, stories that would benefit the mulcted and misled masses. This was not one of them.
More to the point, members of the media ought to be in the business of reporting about reality, not acting out on their immense egos by assigning “symbolic” meaning to relatively minor events.