How Time called the end of the Republican revolution

Interesting theory. We shall see. Already they have the Reagan-with-a-tear post mortem. Trouble is, like a good run at the craps table, you only know it was a good run when it's over. Of course, many of us, including resident Swamplanders, have watched the entire bizarre trajectory with horror in real time. Whether the Coulter cover was a peak or a nadir, of course, is debatable, I guess.

Justin, I don't think Rick Stengel monitors this blog that closely, so maybe you'd comment on the Bill Moyers piece on the selling of the war? Maybe say something about David Halberstam and how sad it is that today's lapdog journalism is so different from what he practiced?

I realize you're supposed to write Freakanomics-like stuff about business on this blog, but why not venture out of the "what box office figures tell us about the price of soybeans futures" box and take a stab at some other stuff? I think you may be low profile enough to get away with it.

So, you are saying that Time is more portentuous than say, Newsweek or U.S News?

Yes, we are the most portentous magazine in the whole world, except maybe for Der Spiegel on a really good week. Didn't you know?

As for Tom T's question:
1) Didn't see the Moyers thing. I know, I should watch the online version. But I'm too busy figuring out what box office figures tell us about the price of soybean futures.
2) Journalists who buck the Washington mainstream have always been a tiny minority, and I don't buy the claim that today's maverick minority is any smaller than that of past decades or that today's mainstream is any more lapdoggy. I did post a while back about what HAS changed over the years.
3) The combination of a wartime atmosphere and a popular Administration that had more or less declared war on the press probably made it even harder to be a member of the maverick minority for a while there from about 2001-2004.

Thanks, Justin.

I didn't mean to suggest so much that the media is more lapdoggy today than before (I have no idea), merely that the media today is more lapdoggy than Halberstam was.

The earlier you post you linked to was terrific. Thanks for sharing it.

I think that the Moyers program provided evidence that the media is more "lapdoggy" (sort of). The media used to act as an "arbiter of facts", there was an effort made to actually provide a "no spin zone" where facts were paramount. That has practically disappeared, to be replaced almost entirely by competing versions of reality "spun" by the people ordained by the media as spokesmen and experts.

In essence, the media has lost its independence from its sources -- it can't be bothered to check the facts anymore.

I have some personal experience with this phenomenon, thanks to the research I did on Bush's military records. When I started publishing my findings, I got a lot of buzz in the progressive blogosphere, and mentioned by "mainstream" people like Dan Froomkin and Eric Alterman (back when he was doing a daily column for MSNBC.com). I started getting calls from mainstream media types -- by and large they were completely uninterested with the FACTS, all they wanted were my conclusions.

Now, because I'm just some guy from Philadelphia who did research that nobody else had done, I refused to talk "on the record" with the media. I wasn't an "expert", I'd just laid out the facts --- but to these "reporters" there was no story unless I was willing to be quoted -- they needed a PERSON to hang the story on.

The facts were there -- and were later used in stories (US News, LA Times) with other people willing to present themselves as "experts", and I was never mentioned in print (which was fine with me); the closest I came to "print" coverage was a long article in Salon after I spent a couple of hours explaining my research to Eric Boehlert. (I was annoyed that he mentioned my name so much in the piece, but I couldn't complain because he never quoted what I'd said to him.)

It is this dependence on "somebody said X is a fact" rather than declaring "X is a fact" that has resulted in a "lap-doggy" press. "Sources" now control what reporters write -- if a reporter doesn't write what the sources want them to write, that reporter can be cut off.

"Yes, we are the most portentous magazine in the whole world, except maybe for Der Spiegel on a really good week. Didn't you know?"

No, Justin Fox, I didn't know. My daughter bought a subscription to Time for herself, which my husband and I mostly read. I had no idea that it had such a good rating on the portentousness scale. I knew they were on to something though, when they reported on a South American president wearing a sweater. Was that you? It was hilarious.

I'll be sure to check out Der Spiegel, see what they have to say about Australia and so on.

I vote for more lapdoggy as well. Yeah, there has always been superficial lapdogs, but you also had newspeople (newsmen in those days) who took their role seriously; that is, that their primary job was to relay the important news to their audience. I'm of the era of Huntley Brinkley and Cronkite and believe me, they didn't think that it was their duty to protect high level administration official who committed crimes, as the major prima donnas of today seem to think. There is absolutely no one in broadcast news today that compare to those three anchors. The major broadcast networks go for looks first and access second, and it falls off from there. So we are burdened with nitwits like Katie Couric whose first Free Speech segment was given to Rush Limbaugh, who has a national platform to express his free speech on the radio waves three hours per day. Then you have the lapdogs in the dead tree news: the High Broderists. We all know who they are. Sure there are competent journalists, Dana Priest immediately comes to mind, but they are few. And non-existent in the broadcast news.

Lapdoggie. A LOT more lapdoggie.