Historical Comment

Glenn Greenwald today has a column at Salon.com addressing the issue of journalistic deference to elected officials, sparked by some interesting reactions by the press to comments made by Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs in response to an interview done by Dick Cheney over the weekend with CNN. Greenwald, I feel safe in concluding, feels the deference is misplaced. In some ways this also corresponds to some of the reactions to Jon Stewart's takedown of Jim Cramer and CNBC last week, especially from other media outlets who seem not to grasp the comedic nature of Stewart's show (which airs, after all, on Comedy Central), or to see that the generally positive response to Stewart's takedown is at least partly relief that someone-- anyone-- in the media was willing to step forward and call someone on their errors.

Anyway, this reminded me of the Black Sox scandal in the 1919 World Series, when members of the heavily favored Chicago White Sox (pictured above) accepted money from gamblers to throw the series. I know that a sports story from 90 years ago seems pretty remote from the cases mentioned above, but there is a connection. In 1919, gambling in sports, and in baseball particularly, was a pretty common thing. Even the direct involvement of players was hardly unknown, and significant evidence exists that even such big names as Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker may have been implicated (albeit in meaningless late season games). There was one player named Hal Chase, who despite some real talent, was widely recognized as a bad seed who put himself (and his wallet) ahead of the team. The point I want to make is that the environment was ripe for something to happen on the scale of the Black Sox scandal largely because the reporters covering the game turned a blind eye to the festering corruption. They had invested so much in promoting the game, arguing its centrality as a cornerstone of "Americanism," that to identify any ethical or legal transgressions was apparently considered tantamount to admitting their own complicity in foisting a lie on the public. This protective attitude was no doubt partly built on their relationship with the players, with whom they traveled and worked on a daily basis-- in other words, they recognized a bond with their subject and not their audience, which I think is what has happened with a lot of our political reporting today. In the interests of preserving access to inside information, too much of the traditional press in Washington has become overly deferential, afraid to risk any insult that would leave them disconnected. There's nothing new in this, but in the wake of Watergate, one might have reasonably thought a more aggressive, more independent media might have emerged, Unfortunately, it seems that the next generations of reporters were inspired less by Woodward and Bernstein's rigorous work ethic (as described in their book All the President's Men) than the fact that their celebrity led to them to be depicted on the silver screen by Redford and Hoffman. At least Jon Stewart displays no pretensions about his place in the information food chain, even though his critics can't help but imagine he harbors the same naked self-interest that evidently motivates them.