A “miserable, carping retromingent vigilante"

Micholas Lemann asks "why is everyone mad at the mainstream media?" It's an interesting piece and provides plenty of examples of the obsessiveness -- on the Left and Right -- with the imagined biases of the "MSM."

What has responsible journalists worried -- and rightly so -- is that their "compact" with the public to provide intellectually honest and inquisitive reporting is fraying. They are beginning to wonder if at a time when we need a free press to "do its job," as I and others in the blogopoly are fond of saying, many citizens not only don't believe them anymore (and, in fact, put them at the same professional level as the blow-dried idiots on local TV news), they don't even want them around anymore.

That's why it is so disheartening at the lack of real outrage with the administration's various attempts to buy "journalists" and provide press passes to obvious hacks. One wonders if Joe and Jane America assume that all journalists covering the White House are, on the weekends, running "Men4Men" websites.

Anyway, to show how far the MSM has fallen, and how cringingly passive they are compared with their forebears, check out this tidbit from Lehmann's report.

The White House almost never likes the press. The Nixon Administration, for example, regularly complained about liberal bias, but people in newsrooms didn’t agonize much about those complaints. Ben Bradlee, of the Washington Post, captured the prevailing sentiment in 1978, when, in a letter to Reed Irvine, of Accuracy in Media, an early conservative press critic, he referred to him as a “miserable, carping retromingent vigilante.” Probably most journalists who worked in the mainstream media were liberal, but they were also confident in their professionalism, and believed that they successfully kept their political views out of their work. Even crusading journalism wasn’t ideological but moral; Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame” documentary, which aired in 1960, was aimed at righting a wrong, not at taking sides in an employment dispute between agribusiness and migrant workers. With this history, one can understand why 2004 was such a bad-karma campaign year for the mainstream media, which collectively felt both more harshly attacked and less important—a pair of misfortunes that rarely occur at the same time.

I would love to hear Bill Keller call Brent Bozell a "miserable, carping retromingent vigilante."

And speaking of a "miserable, carping retromingent vigilante," Wolcott teaches that idiot, Michael Medved, something about the economics of them new-fangled motion pictures.