Immediately after the assassination of Benazir
Bhutto the front page story in the Washington Post about Pakistan and
the presidential campaign did not even mention Joe Biden, the only
candidate who seriously distinguished himself on the Pakistan crisis.
Upon reflection, the Washington Post editorial
page, which has supported Bush on the Iraq war as Pravda supported
Leonid Brezhnev,
followed up with a lead editorial on candidates
and Pakistan, which, incredibly, did not even
acknowledge of Joe Biden.
Here is why the major media, including the daily
newspapers, has lost such credibility with the
American people and in the case of insider print
media, so many subscribers who moved their
business to internet sites, including this one.
It is not only Biden. The insider political media
is now embedded with, and morphed into, the
insider political classes to the point where they
part of the same beast. The insider political
reporters have moved beyond the courtiers
that Stephen Colbert so brilliantly satired two
White House correspondents dinners ago; and
have fully joined the home team of the insider
Washington establishment.
This class decided a year ago which candidate
was inevitable, and which candidates were
exiled into the insider media gulag, destined
to disappear as though they never existed.
By any standard, Joe Biden, Bill Richardson
and Chris Dodd stand at the top of the list
in presidential qualification, stature, substance
and a lifetime of depth and achievement. A
reasonable person might conclude that each
of these three, has equal or greater qualification
to be president as any of the three leading
Democrats.
Yet from the beginning, they were banished by
the insider classes like the Soviets banished
dissidents in the Gulag, like Pinochet banished
the disappeared in the darker days of Chile.
Biden, Richardson and Dodd simply did not
exist in the eyes of the annointing class, a
group of political insiders with an extremely
narrow life experience beyond their life as
political insiders with each other.
Biden, Richardson and Dodd are the political
detainees of our time, the political prisoners of
our democracy, treated with contempt and
scorn by the elites of the political press who,
by doing so, are showing their contempt and
scorn for the standards of professionalism in
journalism, and their contempt and scorn for
the very notion of the role a free press should
play in our democracy.
Who do these people think they are, that during
most of the presidential debates, the three
candidates with such vast experience had to
virtually ask permission, to sandwich a few
seconds of their views, into the most boring,
shallow, vapid, pointless debates that any
serious democracy could possibly conduct
at such a momentous time in our history?
Regarding the last Iowa Democratic debate,
who do these sainted Iowa debate organizers
think they are, that Alan Keyes gets prime
participation in the Republican debate while
Dennis Kucinich is banned from the Democratic
debate?
I cannot even show minimal professional
respect; only an idiot would give Keyes
prime exposure while treating Kucinich
like a Guantanamo detainee; and the idiots
that made this decision have far too much
power, in Iowa and nationally, for the health
of our democracy.
The internet will continue to mature; grow and
flourish over time; some reporters and some
television will rejoin the real America and
prosper while major newspapers such as
the Washington Post will careen towards
obsolescence and ultimate extinction unless
they dramatically get with the program of true
democracy and serious standards of journalism.
In the meantime, the reason the so-called
pundits and media elites are almost always
wrong is they are so divorced from the real
America and so embedded into their provincial
elitism.
The only thing that is truly inevitable is that
the courtier classes and incestuous bonds
between media insiders and political insiders
are destined to fade further into the mist,
until they are left with large galas of insider
self-congratulation, and no remaining customers as the real America
takes its business elsewhere.