Talking heads and pundits are important. They set limits on what we talk about, and help define "good" and "bad" political ideas.
Pundits and the press are supposed to protect us by finding out the truth. They're supposed to investigate, dig, ferret out the facts. They're supposed to make sure the citizens know about what elected offficials are doing. They're bullshit detectors - their job is to call bullshit on the crazy things politicians say and do.
Freedom of the press is important because power corrupts. Maybe we can help do something to reform the press.
More below.
It is clear that the press has failed us. The press should have been far more aggressive in its reporting about the run-up to the Iraq war.
Unfortunately, instead of a suspicious, leery press, we got a bunch of cheerleaders.
There WERE a few reporters and pundits who got it right about the war. But they were ridiculed and pushed aside.
What's worse, even now, when it's clear that the war is a disaster, the cheerleaders who supported it continue to dominate discussion of the war. And they continue to be rewarded financially, despite being so wrong about something so important. Meanwhile, those few pundits and writers who were RIGHT about the war continue to be marginalized.
A quick rundown of a few examples of this can be found in Jebediah Reed's article, "The Iraq Gamble
At the pundits' table, the losing bet still takes the pot"
http://www.radaronline.com/...
There's a reason for this phenomenon.
The media is owned and run by giant corporations - companies that make money off the war, and off a government controlled by the GOP. War is good for business.
Businesses like GE, TimeWarner, GM and the rest don't give 2 shits about the lives of American soldiers or Iraqi civilians. Corporations have no conscience, as they say in business school, and all decisions are made with an eye on the bottom line.
These corporations presented the American public with a bunch of pro-war pundits in an attempt to sell the war. It worked for a while, but now Americans have become more suspicious.
It appears to me that the interests of the media are no longer in line with the interests if the public.
The public wants the truth. More and more, the only place to find truth - the only place where people are willing to call bullshit - is on the Internet. That's why the popularity of blogs continues to rise.
But the blogs aren't "mainstream". They may be powerful, influential, cutting edge - but they're still not as capable of swaying public opinion as, say, the evening news.
I wonder, might it be possible to create enough buzz about pundits and writers who were RIGHT about the war - people like Jonathan Schell http://www.thenation.com/... Robert Scheer http://www.robertscheer.com - that their voices were heard by a wider audience?
Heck, even a conservative like William Lind http://www.d-n-i.net/... is preferable to somebody like the "center left" Tom Friedman.
Listen to what Lind had to say about Bush's recent speech:
"On the surface, President Bush's Wednesday night speech adds up to precisely nothing. The President said, "It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq," but the heart of his proposal, adding more than 20,000 U.S. troops, represents no change in strategy. It is merely another "big push," of the sort we have seen too often in the past from mindless national and military leadership. Instead of Dave Petraeus, why didn't Bush ask Sir Douglas Haig to take command?
"Relying on more promises from Iraq's nominal government and requiring more performance from the Iraqi army and police are equally empty policies. Both that government and its armed forces are mere fronts for Shiite networks and their militias. If the new troops we send to Baghdad work with Iraqi forces against the Sunni insurgents, we will be helping the Shiites ethnically cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis. If, as Bush suggested, our troops go after the Shiite militias in Baghdad and elsewhere, we will find ourselves in a two-front war, fighting Sunnis and Shiites both. We faced that situation briefly in 2004, and we did not enjoy it.
"All this, again, adds up to nothing. But if we look at the President's proposal more carefully, we find it actually amounts to less than zero. It hints at actions that may turn a mere debacle into disaster on a truly historic scale...."
I want to get commentary like THAT into play, to compete with the insanity put forward by Kristol, Friedman, Kagan, Brooks and the like.
Could the Daily Kos community help?
How might it be possible to raise the level of national interest in writers like Scheer, Lind, Schell, and others?
Would links be enough?
Should we start a running system to front-page articles writtern by pundits who were right about the war?
Should we invite those pundits - most of whom are "old media" types - to guest post on Daily Kos?
Hundreds of thousands of people interested in politics read this blog every day. Elected officials occasionally post here. This blog has power.
I wonder if there's a way to harness that power to reform the media?