REGARDING MEDIA / TIM RUTTEN - 'Dogged' press just reflects consensus
OF all the myths propagated about the American news media, none is more laughable than the notion that it is an adversarial institution, that journalists today compose a kind of cultural fifth column.
The truth of the matter is that our reporters, editors, photojournalists and broadcasters are about as relentlessly bourgeois a group as you're likely to meet anywhere. By and large, they are, by virtue of education and income, deeply rooted in the broad American middle class, resolutely and uncritically middlebrow in their tastes and opinions.
The growing influence of the 24-hour news cycle and online journalism, which have given a new prominence to analysis and opinion, has made all this painfully apparent. Survey the news media's treatment of any major news story today, and what comes to mind is that protean commentator Walter Bagehot's scathing dismissal of Sir Robert Peel as "a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities."
That's pretty much the story of analytic and opinion journalism today -- uncommon technical facility in the service of utterly commonplace thought.
Take, for example, the way the commenting classes responded this week to a pair of guilty pleas to criminal charges lodged against two public men -- Michael Vick, the star quarterback of the NFL's Atlanta Falcons, and Larry E. Craig, the senior Republican senator from Idaho. Vick pleaded guilty to federal charges growing out of his role in a dog-fighting operation; Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after he allegedly solicited sex from an undercover police officer in an airport men's room.
In both cases, the virtual tidal wave of responses in the allegedly adversarial and countercultural press precisely mirrored the popular consensus concerning Vick's and Craig's respective conduct.
For the professional football player, that meant universal revulsion and condemnation. Given the fact that you can't spit these days without hitting a columnist or commentator of some kind, you'd think one of them might have said something like: "This is disgusting, but you know they're only dogs. Do we really want to jail a guy and ruin his life over this?" You might have thought that, somewhere, there'd have been an editor who assigned a reporter to find out whether Vick came from a family or community with a tradition of dog fighting? You know, the kind of let's-see-if-we-can-understand-why-he-did-this treatment we routinely give mass murderers.
