Media a 3 Legged stool

Via Atrios, the Media gets defensive. Imagine that, when you have no justification for your failure, defend the process, forget the product, at all costs.

What's more important, that Obama does or doesn't wear a flag pin made in China on his lapel, or that Obama is critical of President Carter going to Syria to talk with Hamas leaders?

Wouldn't that be a bit more of an issue you could ask "tough" questions about? The media has decided that their questioning was "tough," that is the Party Line, but is it tough? A tough interview question forces you to think; makes you and the questioner a bit uncomfortable, unpopular even; forces you to give an answer that might reveal something about how you are going to behave on the job, how your actions might cause pain and suffering and harm to other people. I'm pretty certain that questions of symbolism do none of those things.

You know who asks tough questions, or at least he used to? Jim Gray at NBC Sports. Remeber when he grilled Pete Rose on his gambling during the World Series, way back in 1999? That was tough, and unpopular, yet he did the job. Not so Charlie Gibson or Mop Top Stephanopoulos.

And why should those elitists do something unpopular, simething that might harm their precious Q rating? Thus we see the faqilure of the media, the fundamental failure of the whole concept of a free press, and the reasons why the Founding Fathers set up our government the way they did, with checks and balances, not so much that no one group could become more powerful than the others, but so that no one group could escape accountability.

That's why there is Sarbanes-Oxley in the business world, so that no one can create and benefit from a fraud, not without lots of help from other groups outside your own. But the MSM has nothing to act as a check save the whole of the public and the dirty effing hippy bloggers.

So we get the media narrative we get because nobody can touch the media, really. And until someone or thing can reach out and create a counterweight to their self serving crap, nothing is going to change.