So there are two videos are on the rec list right now. I caught both of them before they hit the Kos. Here they are again, for reference-
Rick Sanchez to Fox News- You Lie!
Ratigan LOSES IT on Party of No Healthcare
As a student of the American mass media, it occurs to me that something important might be happening in both of these videos, beyond the usual "OMG CNN TOTALLY SMACKED DOWN FUX NOISE!!ONE" kind of thing that flares up on liberal blogs everywhere over videos like this.
I try to keep in mind when watching the news that journalists, especially of the political variety, are usually members of the cultural elite. They generally come from upper-middle-class backgrounds, have good educations, and hobnob with the American plutocracy on a regular basis. They are linked in a much more significant way to the people they report on then the people they report to.
This Spring, the journalistic elite were warning of the dangers of populist outrage, about the dangers of mob rule as it applied to exacting confiscatory measures against investment bankers, who stole were extended cordial invitations to take billions of dollars from the U.S. treasury for no apparent reason.
That the people might be right to be outraged at such gross abuse was a viewpoint rarely presented in the more "serious" media outlets. My guess is that journalists chose to defend the financial sector because most of the journalists who covered it were in New York, and most of them probably had a lot of friends on Wall Street-- friends that they didn't want to see run down with pitchforks after they had already lost their jobs.
Now, however, things seem as though they might be changing.
This is a fairly radical piece of writing that I find essential to understanding what happened in America in 2008, and what's happening now. It may also explain, paradoxically, where the Tea Party movement is coming from. There is one problem that I see with its findings:
Thirty years of Republican bi-partisan corporatist government have failed us in ways that are not just inept or corrupt, but also have brought us to the same dangerous brink where so many other empires have erupted into violent revolution.
On this site, of course, we know that the disease of corporatism is one that infects both parties, the difference being that the American left considers this a bad thing. It also infects our mainstream media to an extent, but one part of the article I linked to makes an interesting point, and it's this:
Mere unrest among the working and middle classes, all by itself, isn't enough. Revolutions require leaders — and those always come from the professional and intellectual classes.
For the purpose of this argument, let's consider journalists part of this professional and intellectual class.
In most times and places, these groups (which also include military officers) usually enjoy comfortable ties to the upper classes, and access to a certain level of power. But if those connections become frayed and weak, and the disaffected intellectuals make common cause with the lower classes, revolution becomes almost inevitable.
The problems that these two anchors address in these videos- Republican unwillingness to negotiate in good faith, and the push by the right-wing media to divide America into camps- have been problems for years. So has health care, for that matter.
So what does it mean that these problems are now being acknowledged, and in small ways, actually addressed, by the non-partisan media? What has changed?
In my opinion, it's that the plutocracy has gone too far, and the media know it.
Journalists know that they can no longer depend on the ownership class for their livelihood, as demonstrated by the rapacious drive among media companies for higher profit margins in the 90's, and the subsequent collapse and bankruptcy of a number of newspapers due to the resulting drop in quality of coverage.
In other words, the people with the money went so far in their drive for higher profits during the boom years that they have endangered the livelihood of not just the lower classes, but the professional class that they depend on for their hegemony, and who are smart enough to know who's f***ing them.
But I could be wrong. What do you think?