Sleeping with the Enemy?

Anything--anything--that just might possibly shake the 4th estate out of its decades long torpor is okay by me. Hell, I'm happy just to stick it to them a little.

The media are fat and lazy. And rich. I disagree with NYRB, though, that journalists would cover news fearlessly if they weren't under the bootheel of their nasty corporate overlords. The plain fact is journalists are drawn from the same social pool as their corporate media employers, not to mention politicians, etc. Like their politician counterparts, contemporary journalists are simply too insulated by class and income to relate to the concerns of Americans who scuffle from paycheck to paycheck. Or lose everything they have because of a hurricane. If anything, they view the trials and tribulations of working people with palpable condescension. So the notion of the plucky independent reporter breaking a big story against the will of villainous oligarchs is a romantic and self-serving fiction because in fact they are the same class. What's also changed is how thoroughly marginalized the voice of "the little guy" has become-- you know, the real little guy, the ones who fought for unions, for minimum wage, the used-to-be-Democrats. The ones the Democrats lost through hubris and the rad right bamboozled into thinking they give a crap about.

But I digress. Link here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18555