Fascinoma

Of course you would expect the moronic and mendacious Michael Gerson (he who gave the world the self-disclosing slogan "axis of evil") to spew nonsense in the editorial pages of the Washington Post. And given that he is another one of these sad, dangerous cases of arrested development who feels entirely free to judge others while pathologically resisiting any self-awareness, it's not surprising that the very article he pens could be Exhibit A for his thesis; that we are witnessing "Journalism's slow sad death." It cannot occur to him that, insfoar as he is demonstrably a criminal, partisan hack, apologist and for and enabler of the most corrupt adminsitration in America's history, his "contributing" to one of the nation's leading papers might be smoking-gun evidence that indeed, the news is dead.

Predictably enough Gerson squeezes out some favorite fascist talking points in his lament for the late great estate of journalism. He finds in the hideous and distinctly right-wing Newseum a shrine to journalism past glories -- which is telling enough in itself. And he notes that for many "conservatives" (more properly fascists) "'main-stream media' is an epithet" because it's not right-wing enough. Besides the misnomer, this assertion ignores the fact that the main-stream media has been very, very right-wing since about 1941, and daily grows more so. Still, this absurdity he immediately tops with a flat out falsehood (carefully couched as rehtorical question): "Didn't the Internet expose the lies of Dan Rather?" The answer to this question is, not surprisingly: no.

Contrary to the impression given by the mainstream media, it has never been clearly established that the documents he relied on were fake; nor that if they were, Rather knew it; nor that any of the claims he made in the report on Bush' sourn with the Champagne Squadron were in any particular false. Rather's report was accurate, but because he attacked a right-winger he had to be penalized for it, and convicted in the press of heinous misdeeds against journalism. This of course is completely fine with Gerson.

It goes without saying that Gerson, Evil Axis Professor of False Equivalencies, should seize upon Paul Starr's rather foolish lapse into LCDspeak, "As Walter Cronkite prospered in the old environment, Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann thrive in the new one." This of course promotes the Right Winger's most cherished and useful falsehoods, that Olbermann is as partisan, mendacious and malicious as O'Reilly (Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, Savage, Fox and Friends, et alia, ad nauseam) and that his the very existence of his show counterbalances any slight rigthtward tilt in cable news.

Gerson says, "I dislike media bias as much as the next conservative," as if self-described conservatives had a legitimate case to make, even as the war crimimals they elected go scot-free, unindicted even by the press.

And he closes with one more multivalent falsehood: "This profession [journalism] has a social value that is currently not reflected in its market value. What is to be done? A lot of good people are working on it. " Hr seesm to be implying that he himself is some sort of journalist and that his excretion constitutes here an instance of same. And he doesn't provide any evidence that the many millionaires of the corporate media are somehow undervalued. Nor does he support his equally dubious claim that "good people are working on it."

In any event, none of this is surprising. What is surprising is the comments his article drew. A truly amazing number of brownshirts wrote in to vituperate agaisn t the mainstream media because it wasn't Nazi enough! Here's a mild example:

My fellow Americans -- we are well and truly fucked.