Glenn Greenwald: Megan McArdle and Dan Drezner's defense of the media

[babylonsister]

I don't want Glenn as an enemy! :scared:


Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday April 8, 2008 07:52 EDT
Megan McArdle and Dan Drezner's defense of the media

(updated below)


Several days ago, I documented that the establishment media has virtually ignored new revelations of radical government behavior (the implementation of a torture regime at the highest levels of government, the suspension of the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S., patent falsehoods about the 9/11 attacks and surveillance laws from the Attorney General) while devoting extreme amounts of attention to matters so petty and juvenile that they defy derision (e.g., Barack Obama's bowling prowess and eating habits, gossip about Hillary and Monica Lewinsky, etc.).

I didn't expect that anyone would actually defend the media's conduct here because it's so self-evidently indefensible -- so ludicrous -- and because defending it would, by definition, require someone to spout rationale that is just inane. But yesterday, both Megan McArdle (of The Atlantic) and Dan Drezner (a Professor at Tufts) stepped up and showed that none of that would deter them. They both reject the idea that any of these facts demonstrate that there is something wrong with our political press.

The "points" they make along the way are just painfully self-refuting and outright false (self-evidently so), so I'm only going briefly to address a couple of those points for illustrative purposes. I want to focus, instead, on some substantive, broader points which their mentality demonstrates.

McArdle's principal point is that "Americans care more about {Obama} than John Yoo because, well, John Yoo isn't running for president" and that "most people don't care about minor government functionaries." Just think about that for a moment. Megan McCardle thinks that John Yoo is basically the DOJ version of Lynndie England -- just some low-level guy who went off on his own and did some isolated, unauthorized bad things in the past that our political leaders have now corrected.

She quite obviously has no idea that the memoranda John Yoo wrote -- legalizing government torture, declaring presidential omnipotence, and suspending the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. -- are not merely his opinion, but became the official position of the entire Executive Branch of the U.S. Government. She also quite obviously has no idea that he did all of that in close association with the most powerful political officials in the White House, including David Addington, Alberto Gonzales and ultimately Donald Rumsfeld, nor does she have the slightest awareness that the torture-authorizing memoranda were used to brief Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantanamo who then went to Iraq to train the commanders of American prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, nor that the theories of presidential omnipotence underlying it all remain firmly in place.


more...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/08/exceptionalism/index.html

[Supersedeas]

1. if only there were others turning the spotlight on media complicity