Media and the Myth of Insider Access

To a press still dining out on the glory of the 30+-year-old Watergate cover-up, the need for current Deep Throats and access to insiders appears to be self-evident. To the rest of us, not so much.

First off, if the Valerie Wilson example showed us anything, it’s that big-time reporters can be dupes for leaks and manipulation on a grand and damaging scale unimaginable to an ordinary citizen. Just read Anatomy of Deceit for the sad and sorry evidence of the further taming of an already compliant and neutered press corps. It’s enough to make you weep.

Second, if you look over the landscape of reporting that has most recently led to real accountability and possibility for change, a vast majority of it did not rely on anonymously supplied insider information. The Walter Reed scandal and the U.S. Attorney story are prime examples. The former stemmed from putting reporters on the ground in the hospital for more than a year and the latter from sharp-eyed bloggers noticing a disturbing pattern of geographically scattered but publicly announced firings. Both led directly to congressional hearings, which did indeed call up information unavailable to the public, but without a journalistic middleman pumping a source a citizen couldn’t reach. The process leapfrogged straight from old-fashioned paying attention and reporting the facts to landing on the desks of people with subpoena power.

Third, with the availability of the internet, the necessity for a middleman conveyor of insider information becomes more questionable year by year. A whistleblower stymied by an establishment agency from revealing information can take it to the web, as Craig Murray famously did in 2005 in the face of Britain’s stringent Official Secrets Act, beseeching other web sites (including Daily Kos, we should all be proud to say) to mirror his memos about torture before the UK government took down his site. Yes, he was braving the powers that be with his name out in the open, something other whistleblowers may be loathe to do. But as the case of Russell Tice illustrated in the NSA leak to the New York Times the probability that your identity is going to be made public sooner rather than later is a risk most leakers know from the get-go. The decades-preserved anonymity of Deep Throat is an anomaly, and most brave whistleblowers know this when they make their fateful choice.

The NSA leak brings up a fourth point: What good does inside information do if it’s held back at the request of the powers that be? The contortions the Times went through when trying to explain its decision to withhold revelations of illegal wiretapping were transparently and embarrassingly face-saving. As a once-proud former member of the Fourth Estate, I was forced to admit that a barista with a Live Journal could have made better use of the information, publishing it without running it for more than a year through the filters of the Bush administration, elections be damned.

Which brings me to a fifth point: even with op-ed, I want – oxymoronic as it may sound – unbiased opinion. What I mean by that is I expect opinions free of personal bias. I can handle known ideological prejudice; in fact, I purposely seek out opinion pieces from conservatives in order to do as much as I can to keep my own mind open (a never-ending challenge) and to understand their reasoning. When I read George Will, I know I’m getting a conservative worldview. When I read Paul Krugman, I know I’m getting a liberal worldview. I can make allowances for what I’m reading and judge their pieces based on that. What I can’t weigh as an average citizen is the chummy personal incestuousness of the beltway. There’s no way I can know that an opinion writer’s kid is on the same Chevy Chase soccer team as that of a State Department spokesperson, or whether a reporter’s brother-in-law is married to some mid-level staffer at the DOJ whose job may be on the line if coverage leads to policy changes. Even with the best of intentions, reporters cannot be expected to be entirely objective about hammering someone they may have to face across a dinner table the following week.

In this sense, I would argue that we’re much, much better off with discerning and observant nobodies from the outside taking on the lion’s share of informed – and informing – commentary.

Finally, what does a coveted "insider" press pass get you in Washington these days? So you’re a blogger who, like Garrett Graff of Media Bistro, at last gets official sanction to attend a White House press briefing. Hurray for bloggers everywhere! What a victory! You too now are anointed by the gatekeepers to waste precious hours getting total non-answers and weaving-and-ducking spin from the likes of Fleischer, McClellan, Snow and Perino, just like the real professionals. Only they get paid for it, you know. Most bloggers, I hardly need to remind readers here, do not. Their only commodity is time and attention, and in my book, they’d be much better off culling whatever the most recent Friday afternoon document dump wrought than shoring up the legitimacy of kabuki press briefings. But that’s just my opinion.

The fact is, the traditional media’s argument that it’s "connected" – a defense it has used to defuse "amateurs" for years – has emerged under the Bush administration as one of the press’s biggest liabilities. Informed bloggers now can get hold of government reports, press briefing transcriptions, C-SPAN and campaign rally videos on You Tube, and make their own points about what they’re discovering from original source material. Readers of blogs, like readers of traditional media outlets, can learn which sources of commentary and analysis on the web are reliable and which are not; a public that has learned to discern between the value of a story in the National Inquirer versus one in The New Yorker should be able to clear the same hurdle in an electronic medium. Those who can’t won’t, in either case.

The future lies in being unabsorbed by the establishment and unconnected, and, my friends, I suspect that future starts now. Right here on the tubes.