I was close to canceling my subscription to Salon, and then they made Glenn Greenwald one of their regular columnist/bloggers.  I haven’t read a thing by him yet that is not in my opinion pitch perfect. While the scope of his writing embraces a broader spectrum of topics than Bob Somerby’s Daily Howler does, Greenwald has been covering Somerby’s beat in recent weeks (which Somerby applauds, even nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize), and his theme has been how the press has been reduced to  courtiers to power, and how this has been corrosive to our democratic habits.

This is a theme I’ve written about on several occasions, but Greenwald and Somerby both dig deeper to uncover the underlying connections and money trail that has promoted this sorry turn of events. It’s all about the money and how star journalists have become millionaires whose interests lie in preserving their careers and pay checks or in aspiring to be the ones who will have such careers and paychecks.

Now most Americans see this as a class warfare argument, and this attitude was implicit in a letter Somerby reprints in response to his posts about the millionaire courtier class and their connections:

I generally love your take on things, but PLEASE STOP about the money—I DON’T CARE how rich Brian Williams is, nobody I know cares, it does not effect his work, which I find fairly steady (a compliment to today’s media giants).

I’m looking for insight, great writing, provocative criticism, NOT an obsession with the wealth of a few media barons that really goes nowhere, ever.

Here’s Somerby’s response:

We can sympathize with that; we think the money thing gets tiring too. But in fact, Williams’ work has been horrendous for years—he played the fool shamelessly during Campaign 2000—and nothing explains this ludicrous “haircut-style” coverage except the role big money can plays in the lives of overpaid elites. Sometimes, money makes people get dumb; sometimes, people play dumb to get it. But nothing else can explain the haircut wars—wars which have raged for the past fifteen years—other than the corrupting role being played here by big money.

We’ve offered the following construct before: This coverage is exactly what you’d expect from a multimillionaire press corps. You’d expect to get monstrously fatuous coverage, with story-lines which are endlessly tilted against the leaders of the more liberal party. We’d rather see the world differently too, but these men and women have behaved like fools over the course of the past fifteen years. In the process, they’re destroying American self-governance. And we’d have to assume that they’re playing for pay. No, they just can’t be that dumb.

There are certain things that otherwise smart and well-informed Americans refuse to understand, and among them is the way money and power work to undermine republican values and democratic habits of mind.  It’s somehow out of bounds.  It’s too Marxist sounding or something.  No Americans want to understand whether a politician or a journalist is sincere or a good guy, as if money and power were irrelevant.  But if you don’t understand money and power you understand hardly anything about how our society works and  how it affects where we are going.

Let me close with Greenwald’s quoting the late David Halberstam:

At the core of the old value system was a belief on the part of the men and women who worked in journalism that this was an uncommonly privileged life, that we did not do this for the money — almost all of us could have made a great deal more money in some other field, but we were uncommonly privileged, free men and free women working for a free press in a free society, beneficiaries of exalted constitutional freedoms, willing, if need be on occasion, to report to the nation things which it did not necessarily want to hear.

We have morphed in the larger culture from a somewhat Calvinist society to an entertainment society, and that is reflected in the new norms of television journalism — where the greatest sin is not to be wrong but to be boring. Because boring means low ratings. And so altogether too many people at the top in the television newsrooms have accepted the new, frillier dictates of the men and women above them in the corporations. . . .

The viewpoint seemed to be — from their testing and polling — that the American people did not want to know what was going on, so why bother them with unwanted facts too soon? So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.

Update:   See this piece contrasting the questions asked Republican candidates with those asked the Democrats last week.  For example:

Strangely, though, Giuliani wasn’t asked about Kerik during last night’s debate. When the Democrats debated, Brian Williams asked Barack Obama a loaded question about his ties to a controversial figure. But Rudy Giuliani’s relationship with Bernard Kerik — which could charitably be described as one of the most spectacular examples of poor judgment by a national figure in the past decade — didn’t even come up during the Republican debate. Chris Matthews didn’t say a word. Nor did he ask John McCain about his role in the Keating Five scandal.

In fact, none of the Republican candidates got a single question about their business dealings, personal finances, or ties to controversial figures. Only Democrats got such questions.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how Republicans make the wealth of Democrats ($400 haircuts, private planes) one of their central talking points, but it never comes up with regard to the Republicans.  Is it because we expect Republicans to be corrupted by wealth because they represent without apology the interests of the wealthy, which inoculates their corruption from charges of hypocrisy?  Is it because it seems a contradiction for wealthy Democrats to represent the interests of the non-wealthy, so they are more vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy about wealth? Is it that the only thing that Republicans can be hypocrites about is sex and family values? 

I’m not saying that the Democrats should get a pass about how money
impacts them and their campaigns. I’m just wondering why the
Republicans seem always to get that pass. Why can’t the country get as worked up about Republican’s financial corruption as much as they got worked up about Clinton’s sexcapades.  If reporters were willing to dig, there would be no end of things to talk about.  Do they not dig because money has less entertainment value than sex?  Could it be that stupidly simple?  Or is it because it’s not in the interests who control the media that those dirty secrets be aired because of how complicit media magnates are in that world of power and wealth.

Monday Update:  Greenwald today on the attacks on Olbermann as a liberal ideologue:

What ought to define the function of political "journalists" is that they exercise adversarial oversight over government officials. That is the only thing that makes a political press worthwhile. . . .

Olbermann’s real journalistic crime is that he is too critical of powerful government officials. That is the real crux of Olbermann’s commentary — criticizing Bush officials for their abuses of power, exploitation of fear and terrorism threats for political gain, and blatant corruption. Whereas in the past, exposing abuses of power by our most powerful officials and criticizing corruption was the hallmark of a real journalist, that behavior is now considered out of bounds, the mark of an unacceptable ideologue, not a journalist.

What turns a "journalist" into an ideologue these days is excess criticism of the prevailing Beltway power structure and its most revered and important figures. That — and only that — is what distinguishes Olbermann from those considered to be "real journalists." The function of modern "journalists" is to serve as spokespeople for the Beltway system, to defend it, to adhere strictly to its rules of conduct.

People who have power will abuse it.  There are two institutional checks to prevent that:  the system of governmental checks and balances and the adversarial role of the press. It’s neither liberal or conservative to be adversarial toward those in power. Olbermann isn’t perfect, but what he does isn’t liberal. I feel the same way about what I write here, and get really annoyed when it’s labeled "liberal".  Olbermann is expressing the common-sense outrage of people who are justifiably outraged at this administration’s abuses of power and everyday incompetence. To be appalled at what this government is doing does not brand you as a Liberal.  It’s too convenient for some parties to dismiss criticisms like that as deriving from a partisan bias.