Secrets And Lies

I agree that Shattered Glass is an underrated, understated movie with larger, currently relevant implications. It's easy and obvious enough to dismiss it because of its resolute inside-baseball tone, but its import is at least as apparent, if not quite as titillating as whatever torture-porn flick is infesting the googolplex this week.

I can see why media weasels might not like such a movie -- not that it's suggesting that all ambitious reporters are by nature fabulists à la Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair, but that they are simply ambitious, a trait familiar to most walks of life, and thus more readily accessible. It is the endemic insularity of that seriously compromised profession, cobbled together with repeated daydreams of I.F. Stone and Mary Tyler Moore apparently, that render them both inured and yet defensive to even those fairly mild charges. They tend to be ambitious, and that ambition can at times turn them into situational ethicists, bypassing specific facts in pursuit of greater truths, or more commonly, ignoring important stories for sensationalized nonsense. This is fairly universally applicable; what makes it different here is influential nature of the profession.

But forget the speculative fabulism. What about the easily outlined lack of accountability from people who are still, after being proven wrong over and over again, after being exposed repeatedly for their cheap and convenient preening, asked for their opinions as if they still mattered? It is not Choke Line's refusal to simply acknowledge what we all know and move on accordingly that makes him a mediocre thinker; it is his obstinate insistence on having it both ways, and steadfastly overlooking what he's supposedly learned over the past four years, to apply to what he knows now, to help make him a better prognostimacator and Big Opinion Guy.

It's a sordid little symbiosis at work here, the industry of manufacturing and disseminating Serious Opinion, and its conjoined twin of manufacturing Serious Policy. The latter involves one recently fallen political party continuing its strategy of posturing and baiting the other party, even from a current position of weakness, and the other party continuing to look sheepish and ineffective, lest assclowns like Klein deem them "weak" or "unpatriotic".

The former entity, the punditocracy, operates much the same way, with puling milquetoasts such as Klein constantly falling all over themselves trying to look tough by berating imaginary boogeymen on "the left", while tossing random pro forma discontents at how the actual policymakers have actually done their actual jobs up to this point in time.

After a consistent pattern of this behavior, one can only assume that simply stepping up and saying, "Look, I fucked up, I believed Colin Powell when I shouldn't have, but one thing that has become abundantly clear over the last four years is that these people are psychotic authoritarians" might cost them their Serious Column, or their upcoming appearance on one of the Serious Chat Shows, where everyone whips out their tiny cock-like appendages and talks about how Serious they really are. Seriously.

Klein makes his real shortcomings all the more clear with each new attempt at muddying the discourse. There's no turning back for him at this point, and his puny little arms are certainly not going to span the widening river of diverging opinion, so he may want to consider just choosing a side once and for all. Either he believes in the proferred policy options or he doesn't; either he believes these people are sane and competent or he doesn't. There's not a lot of middle ground anymore.

I understand why Klein and his sniveling, toadying ilk continue to try to scavenge one more Friedman, but I don't understand why they are taken seriously, while people who actually take the notion of a free press seriously do time. Perhaps a little time, in the unemployment line if not in prison, might help Klein and his buddies re-evaluate their misplaced priorities.