Snapping out of it?

Slate has an excerpt up from Eric Lichtblau's forthcoming Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice. Lichtblau was one of the Pulitzer-winning lead reporters on the New York Times's 2005 warantless-wiretapping story, one of the turning points in the public's war against the warmongers. At the time their reporting was attacked as a breach of national security (a line that the administration pushed), but the wiretapping scandal is now simply part of a pattern. Oh well.

The headline on the Slate excerpt reads, 'How reporters bought the administration's national-security line - and why we're snapping out of it.' I just want to respond to the last six words of that headline. You should read the excerpt, which is kind of thrilling. But it's not that hard to see why reporters are 'snapping out of it.' No surprises here: to the extent that major media outlets feel comfortable criticizing the Bush administration, it's because it's now utterly safe to do so. Bush will be out of office in ten months; the Democrats have center stage in the political horserace; the Democrats control Congress and will surely pick up seats in the 2008 election; the Iraq war is unpopular and the semi-official media narrative is that it is and has been a failure.

Why didn't reporters challenge the White House more openly during the run-up to invasion and the debacle (and civil war) that have followed? Partly because it wasn't in their financial interest to do so until now, partly because it might endanger their ability to take part in the day-to-day official media circus (without which what do you talk about?), partly because the White House so effectively stonewalled the media at every turn. But make no mistake, that last cause has surely been a relatively minor concern. The bigger forces are cultural and corporate: investigative newspapers fear to go away, they fear to lose readership and relevance, they fear to upend the apple cart. The news media are deeply invested in the status quo (that is a loose definition of 'conservative,' for those who're keeping score). The reason we celebrate paradigm-changing investigations like the warantless-wiretapping story is that they can't usually happen - they alter the balance of force and counterforce, of official line and oppositional inquiry that preserves the centrality of Big News Outlets.

And this is a largely nonpartisan arrangement. Money is neither red nor blue, after all. All of which is to say that our press corps shouldn't be too proud of 'snapping out of it'; by relying so heavily on the government's official communications and on the practically-official declarations of the long-since sold-out punditocracy, the mainstream corporate media utterly abdicated their responsibilities as custodians of the public good during the Bush presidency, regardless of their political dispositions. The noble tale of hardworking individual reporters struggling against impossible odds might excite us - and it sure as hell flatters the journalists and halfway-journalists and fans who enthusiastically review every book like Lichtblau's - but the local phenomena that interfere with a given investigation run a distant second, in importance, to the news media's grotesque symbiosis with the very worst members of our society (the criminals running it).

Good reporters number in the thousands; but 'good reporters' aren't enough. A failure of imagination has preceded the journalistic establishment's failure of will and means.

[Didactic update: This was the central point of Season Five of The Wire. David Simon has been dining on this point all year. No matter what the (fictional) Sun's local or individual strengths, the paper's place in the city ecosystem has changed - a 'failure of imagination' - and its inability to cover any of the key stories of Season Five (its 'failure of will and means') is simply the notion finding expression.]