On The Media

NPR produces a weekly program called On The Media with Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield. It's a news program about how journalists are reporting the news. Think book reviews written by authors of other books and you've got a general idea.

Not that it's a bad show. Sometimes it can be excellent, but affiliate stations tend to run it off-prime time. In radio, "prime time" is 6 am - 10 am (when people are commuting to work) and 3 pm - 7 pm (when people are commuting home) and Saturday from 8 am - 12 noon when people are puttering around the house.

Invariably, On The Media is broadcast very early Saturday morning, when no one except Buddhists are awake, or on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, when no one is listening to radio except Met opera fans, and only from December to April.

Surfing to the On The Media webpage today, I was not amazed to find stories and comments about the now-ending love affair journalists have had with Barack Obama. Likely that skit on a recent Saturday Night Live made it untenable for news folk to continue. But On The Media has done their part, comprehensively examining the phenomenon and wondering what it meant.

What it meant, of course, is that people who write stories in magazines and newspapers, or report stories on radio and television, are not necessarily any less prone to silly behavior than the rest of us. Objectively, there is a strong case to be made that many journalists were treating the Senator from Illinois with especially soft kid gloves.

Maybe they thought Hillary was not smart enough to notice. They were wrong.

A good friend of Sam is a gentleman down in Alabama named Glynn Wilson who runs an online newspaper and blog called Locust Fork World News. Glynn does some good things, like campaigning against the continued imprisonment of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, a Democrat who was targeted by the Gonzales Justice department and sent to prison on trumped-up charges.

Glynn also epitomized, and still epitomizes, the fascination of a certain segment of the media with Obama. Even before running an editorial endorsing Barack, he was obviously very favorable to him, to the extent of interpreting Obama's primary streak, ended this week, to mean that there would be a landslide Democratic victory this fall and that the country would move farther left than at any previous time since FDR.

All of that was wishful thinking, in Sam's opinion. But it was an extreme expression of what many in the media and the entertainment industry long for: a real life re-enactment of West Wing, during which the problems of the country and world are solved by brilliant, lefty wonks with lots of funding for new social programs and tons of warm fuzziness.

Well, the Democratic race is still on and is getting as ugly as the most partisan Republican could have hoped, defying the media's fairly blatant attempt to manipulate it into a revival of Camelot. But the good news is that people like Brooke and Bob will be looking more closely at their colleagues than ever before.

Perhaps now the media will start questioning the basic assumptions found in the policy prescriptions of McCain, Obama and Clinton that envision an even larger role for government meddling in human activities.

Brooke and Bob can wonder if just the way questions are framed assume certain things.

The most basic assumption that needs to be challenged, and which has not been since the time of FDR, is that the government needs to "do something" about every conceivable human problem.

The evidence of the 20th century should have put that idea to rest. But, in their own peculiar way, journalists are the most conservative of people, refusing to give up a pet belief until there is not only overwhelming evidence against it, but overwhelmingly overt evidence.

One prominent example of that would be the absolute astonishment of many, maybe most, American journalists when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. Sober-eyed economists like Milton Friedman had long predicted it (and predicted it would mostly have to do with the internal rotteness of the system, not outside military pressure).

It took the actual, very public collapse of the Soviets to wake up newspeople to the inherent immorality and corruption of coercive collectivism. But in recent years many seem to have forgotten, as they continue to give warm coverage to collectivist ideas from Obama, Clinton and McCain, without questioning the basic assumption, without asking the question, "But why should the government be doing anything about this -- in a constitutional federal republic?"

Maybe Brooke and Bob can begin asking questions about why their colleagues aren't asking that question.