The two poles of journalism

From Glenn Greenwald's blog:

With his Rolling Stone article on Gen. McChrystal, Michael Hastings has become both the personification of, and spokesperson for, Real Journalism, and as a result, has provoked intense animosity from establishment-serving "reporters" everywhere. He apparently committed the gravest sin: he exposed and embarrassed rather than flattered and protected a powerful government official, and in our upside-down media culture, doing that is a sign of irresponsibility rather than fulfillment of the basic journalistic function.

More here.

If you engage in discussions on whether the corporate media are liberal or conservative, you're kind of not getting the point. I mean, okay, I engage in such discussion, but it's usually in order to get my point across: the corporate news media serve power, which necessarily means a pro-establishment bias, which is, by its very nature, a conservative bias. Of course, my understanding of the word "conservative," in this sense, includes a lot of people who think of themselves as "liberal"--indeed, the far left generally understands American liberals as apologists for the establishment, people who defend the overall power structure as basically sound, but needing a few tweaks; really, conservatives couldn't exist without this kind of liberal, who makes the right wing appear to be a lot less crazy than it actually is.

That is, the whole liberal/conservative construction of news media ideology is more about partisanship than it is about actual ideas: who's being treated better, the (corporate) Democrats or the (corporate) Republicans?

Anyway, given this establishment-protection role the corporate news media play, it is no surprise at all that media figures have come out swinging against a real reporter who, unlike his most of his journalistic comrades, actually did his job. That is, if the news media really is the so-called "Fourth Estate," then it ought to be playing watchdog over the activities of our society's institutions of power. That's what this guy did with his Rolling Stone piece on McChrystal. That other reporters are condemning Hastings, rather than nominating him for awards, buying him beers, and patting him on the back, tells us a great deal about the press in this country.

That is, they're a bunch of idiot-stooges who should be spat upon by every American citizen who takes this country seriously.

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