Oh, how they suffer in the pursuit of the news:
President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.
Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated. Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.
The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House---fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press---has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.
We feel your pain. And we don't care.
When access is the coin of the realm, it's a smart career move to channel talking points that guarantee continued access. That helps explain why, in the interest of maintaining access to its preferred Republican sources and to provide "balance" to its reporting, the Washington news media have spent the last 20 years unquestioningly injecting hundred of bogus right-wing narratives into our mainstream political discourse---from Whitewater to Travelgate, from Swift Boats to voter fraud, from death panels to birth certificates to Skeetgate to Benghazi. Oh, there was also a little war that cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, and that was largely enabled by a Washington media apparatus more interested in relaying breathless tales of yellow cake and aluminum tubes than in determining whether any of what they were being fed by their sources was true. Over the years the practice of uncritical, knee-jerk stenography has taken a toll on our Fifth Estate, to the point where many of their number can no longer discern the difference between hard news and substance-free gossip, which manifests itself not only in repeating outright lies but in obsessing over silly non-controversies such as Marco Rubio's drinking habits or Michelle Obama's dietary preferences. Now we have a Democratic President in the White House who by all accounts doesn't brook fools readily, and who has determined that these same people cannot be trusted to convey his message without it being distorted by some differing opinion that must be dutifully attached in the name of Fairness & Balance. And you know what? For the most part, he's right, and in the interest of quality control, he's decided to take his administration's P.R. operations in-house. Can you blame him?
It scarcely matters: in the era of mass media, every American President has attempted to manipulate television, radio, newspapers, newsreels and every other form of mass communication to its own political advantage. And every administration since the beginning of time has engaged in the selective leaking of classified information to favored media sources. But that's not what's bothering the Politico boys. What's truly chafing them is the inescapable fact that they're not the only game in town anymore, and lo and behold, they really don't like it.
It must be galling to have had to engage in the years of corporate game-playing and ass-kissing necessary to earn a promotion to the White House press corps, only to discover that some 23-year-old punk with a Twitter account at Gawker can scoop you on a story that should rightfully be yours. It even has to be worse when some uncredentialed blogger with access to Nexis can expose your shoddy reporting and trash your credibility. Now it's certainly true that social media, podcasts and digital networks can all be manipulated by the privileged and powerful to serve their own selfish ends---but as we have seen in recent years in Iran, Egypt and elsewhere, they can also be hugely democratizing influences in the dissemination of news. More relevantly, as the New Media has matured and gained more widespread acceptance, it's come to pose a direct threat to the members of our old-school corporate media elite, who have spent many years flattering their favored sources in Washington in exchange for access when they should have been fact-checking their pronouncements and digging through their tax records and financial disclosure forms.
In a way, we should be thankful that Politico published this butthurt cri de coeur because it unwittingly betrays the values of our corporate-owned news media, and of our modern corporation-state in general: Everybody loves to extol the virtues of free competition in the marketplace of ideas---until someone who's smarter and quicker on their feet decides they want to compete against you.
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Baron V