Schwenkwatch

All the cool kids, they write for Doublethink:

What is perhaps strangest of all, though, is Taibbi’s understanding of the role that the mass media have played in the rise of this (exaggerated, as we have seen) cultural chaos. He writes of the unwillingness of newscasters and pundits to call out even the worst idiocies of Congress and the Bush Administration for what they were:

The message of all this was that Americans were now supposed to make their own sense of the world. There was no dependable authority left to turn to, no life raft in the increasingly perilous informational sea. This coincided with an age when Americans now needed to understand more of the world than ever before. … Now broke, or under severe financial pressure, with no community leaders, no community, no news he can trust, Joe American has to turn on the Internet and tell himself a story that makes sense to him.

What story is he going to tell?

The difficulty here is that, as Taibbi quite willingly admits in other contexts, there was an official story being fed to the American people and passed on without much scrutiny by the media: al-Qaeda attacked America because “they hate our freedoms;” the United States had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein posed a real threat to us and our allies; and we needed to trust the government, cede our civil liberties, and send our siblings and children off to faraway lands to fight a “war on terror” in a “post-9/11 world.” With very few exceptions, these stories were the official ones, and they were respectfully quoted and parroted and passed along even by the (in many respects genuinely) “liberal” media as America prepared for, then engaged - and quickly found itself mired - in a misbegotten war. The real problem, then, is not that there was too little “authority” from the media elites, but that there was too too much of it, and that authority quickly transformed into codescension. It is for this reason that those who wished to break away from the official narrative quickly found themselves prowling dark corners of the internet for information on structural engineering and the Project for the New American Century.

I'd be curious to hear what kind of media (partisan? tabloid? objective but more critical?) might have averted this epidemic of credulity. My romanticized picture of scrappy journalism sounds impractical on the national scale, even to my ears.