The ideology of the news business proclaims that it holds powerful interests accountable to the public. Courageously, at great risk to themselves, investigative reporters protect democracy by exposing the crimes and corruption of elected leaders. The iconic example of this brave truth telling is, of course, Watergate, in which Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post, assisted by a shadowy film noir character called Deep Throat, blew open the misdeeds of the Nixon administration. We all saw the movie. It has to be true.
Yet even in the heyday of the newspaper, the relationship of journalism to power was closer to the opposite of that cherished ideal. Reporters were minor players in the games elites played. The news business as a whole reflected a narrow range of elite interests and cultural signaling. Misdeeds at the top were exposed when it suited other elites, never otherwise. John F. Kennedy’s sexual predations were apparently astronomical in number, but we never heard about them—at least while he was alive. He was a protected man. Nixon, a dark and troubled soul, committed the political equivalent of suicide by cop. The media played a small part in his execution—Woodward and Bernstein, an insignificant one.
In any case, the fantasy of the relentless muckraker has been quietly discarded in the digital age. Journalists are now meek handmaidens to the elites and bland deniers of scandal. Democracy, in their view, demands the public’s permanent genuflection before the ruling class. Any other posture smacks of populism or even fascism. The hero is no longer the investigative reporter but the “fact-checker”—a dull but peevish beast whose task it is to count the lies of Donald Trump and dismiss reports of corruption in high places as “conspiracy theories” and “disinformation.” Such naked prostration before the establishment, it should be noted, has less to do with journalistic principles than with a desperate need to attract a paying audience.
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