"Taking One for the Tribe" (Why Mainstream Journalism Truly Sucks)

[NashVegas]

I stumbled onto this terrific essay through a link to a different story a friend had sent me. Enjoy.

For years, I agreed to believe that the common thread of lefty media criticism was the right one: That if only more rational explanations were given to the journalists who got their facts wrong, held unfounded beliefs, or repeated industry-funded dogma they’d change their tune, or at least recant in the face of stronger argument.
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A year ago, I was lucky enough to read a different media critique which makes a hell of a lot more sense: That we should simply understand reporters at the New York Times as evil liars who know they are lying and lie in order stay powerful.
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But it doesn’t answer everything. In some cases, it might just be simple deceit and greed that explains an article lying about corporate oversight to keep the Times’ advertisers happy, or some minor details about nuclear weapons to keep a reporter’s access to sources open at the Pentagon. But what about those hundreds of New York Times articles that won’t admit we’ve lost the war, that never got into hundreds of billions we’ve spent, that continue to tell us that Qaeda is behind the Iraqi insurgency? How come the press never fesses up that it’s the entire 18-to-30-year-old male population in the Sunni Triangle?

This is a very different kind of lying, and I think it can only be explained that these people are writing on behalf of The Tribe. These lies aren’t there to be evil; these are conscientious favors to the rest of the people who share the same mentality as the reporters; sweeping our mistakes under the rug to keep the tribe’s sense of dominance intact and its psyche clean. That’s why the Times, or political opposition leaders will never say anything tougher about the lying top leader than “appeared to mislead”—don’t expect them to.

Because the tribe can never do wrong. For the editors and journalists who knew better, finding a way to explain that the thousands of primitive IED attacks and primitive ambushes were the work of bin Laden’s minions—not the collective effort of a population that was supposed to greet us as liberators—took extraordinary psychic sacrifice on behalf of the tribe, and it was they who have to go bed and digest these lies on behalf of the tribe, not us, so that in the morning, the tribe is still right.

http://www.buffalobeast.com/113/monkey.htm