skeptical of the skeptics

ralph peters, who excellently questioned the media's coverage of military personnel numbers, continues to slaps the media in general.

A SPECTER is haunting journalism: the specter of Watergate.

Three decades ago, two young reporters became the story and crippled American journalism.
[snip]
Overnight, journalism became an upwardly mobile profession — and our country is much the worse for it.

In place of the old healthy skepticism, we have arrogant cynicism. The highest echelons of the media and government became preserves for America's most-privileged. An Ivy League degree was the ticket to a reporting job on a major daily. And incest produced the usual ugly results.

"Mainstream" newspapers lost touch with American workers because the new breed of journalists didn't know any workers.
[snip]
The other product of the Woodward-Bernstein cult was the rise of the self-adoring conviction that journalists were above patriotism, the law and common decency.
[snip]
After Watergate, patriotism became an embarrassment among journalists. They're "citizens of the world."

to make his point, Peters mentions such luminaries as Bob Woodward, Judy Miller, Dana Priest. Peters concludes

As vile as Richard Nixon was, I'm no longer certain that Woodward and Bernstein did our country a service. The post-Watergate journalist's unexamined conviction that he or she is "beyond good and evil" has done far more evil than good.

Actions have consequences. Today's journalists refuse to accept that the rule applies to them. The wages of irresponsible journalism are death — for others. Expose a crucial clandestine operation, shatter a policy or wreck a struggling state, and you get a Pulitzer Prize. The motto of journalists today is "Nothing's ever our fault."

The republic suffers.

¶ - nitish @ 10:35 AM