Empire of Illusion (28 page)

Washington has become our Versailles. We are ruled, entertained, and informed by courtiers—and the media has evolved into a class of courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are mostly courtiers. Our pundits and experts, at least those with prominent public platforms, are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception.

Television journalism is largely a farce. Celebrity reporters, mas querading as journalists, make millions a year and give a platform to the powerful and the famous so they can spin, equivocate, and lie. Sitting in a studio, putting on makeup, and chatting with Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, or Lawrence Summers has little to do with journalism. If you are a true journalist, you should start to worry if you make $5 million a year. No journalist has a comfortable, cozy relationship with the powerful. No journalist believes that serving the powerful is a primary part of his or her calling. Those in power fear and dislike journalists—and they should. Ask Amy Goodman, Seymour Hersh, Walter Pincus, Robert Scheer, or David Cay Johnston.

The comedian Jon Stewart, who hosts the popular
Daily Show with Jon Stewart
on Comedy Central, has become one of the most visible and influential media figures in America. In an interview with Jim Cramer, who hosts a show called
Mad Money
on CNBC, Stewart asked his guest why, during all the years he advised viewers about investments, he never questioned the mendacious claims from CEOs and banks that unleashed the financial meltdown—or warned viewers about the shady tactics of short-term selling and massive debt leverag ing used to make fortunes for CEOs out of the retirement and savings accounts of ordinary Americans.
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Cramer, like most television and many print reporters, gives an uncritical forum to the powerful. At the same time, they pretend they have vetted and investigated the claims made by those in power. They play the role on television of journalists. It is a dirty quid pro quo. The media get access to the elite as long as the media faithfully report what the elite wants reported. The moment that quid pro quo breaks down, reporters—real reporters—are cast into the wilderness and denied access.

The behavior of a Jim Cramer, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in an article on
Salon.com
, mirrors that of the reporters who covered the lead-up to the war in Iraq. Day after day, news organizations as diverse as the
New York Times
, CNN, and the three major television networks amplified lies fed to them by the elite as if they were facts. They served the power elite, as Cramer and most of those on television do, rather than the public.

In Bill Moyer's 2007 PBS documentary
Buying the War,
Moyers asked
Meet the Press
host Tim Russert why he had passed on these lies without vetting them—and even more damaging, he contrasted Russert's work with that of Bob Simon of CBS, who had made a few phone calls and had quickly learned that the administration's pro-war leaks, so crucial in fanning public and political support for going to war, were bogus. Moyers focused on a story, given to the
New York Times
by Vice President Dick Cheney's office, that appeared on the front page of the paper the Sunday morning the vice president was also a guest on
Meet the Press
.
⁶
Moyers began by setting up a video clip of Cheney's performance:

Moyers then ran the clip of Cheney on
Meet the Press
the same morning the
Times
story appeared:

Jonathan Landay, a reporter who had written news stories at the time questioning Cheney's prior assertions that Saddam Hussein had been seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, gave us the sneaky reason the White House had leaked the information—
specifically so Cheney could discuss previously top-secret information on national TV.
Even though
there was no corroboration of that information (and never would be, since it was inaccurate), Cheney could now speak of it publically as if it were fact. “Now,” said Landay, “ordinarily, information like the aluminum tubes wouldn't appear. It was top-secret intelligence, and the Vice President and the National Security Advisor would not be allowed to talk about this on the Sunday talk shows. But, it appeared that morning in the
New York Times
and, therefore, they were able to talk about it.”

Moyers went back to the clip of the Cheney performance:

Moyers, in the studio, asked Bob Simon of CBS what he thought of Cheney's actions:

Moyers continued the video clip, with
Meet the Press
host Russert asking a question that appears to accept, credulously and uncritically, the very statement Cheney had just made.

Moyers, back in the studio, asked Russert, who was with him, why he had not been more incisive and skeptical with his questions, especially with material that was so unprecedented and potentially explosive:

Moyers then told the audience, “Bob Simon didn't wait for the phone to ring,” and returned to his conversation with Simon of CBS.

Walter Pincus of the
Washington Post
suggested that Russert's failure indicated a larger failure of many media figures: “More and more, in the media, become, I think, common carriers of administration statements, and critics of the administration. And we've sort of given up being independent on our own.”
⁷

Russert, like Cramer, when exposed as complicit in the dissemination of misinformation, attempted to portray himself as an innocent victim, as did
New York Times
reporter Judy Miller, who, along with her colleague Michael Gordon, worked largely as stenographers for the Bush White House during the propaganda campaign to invade Iraq. Once the administration claims justifying the war had been exposed as falsehoods, Miller quipped that she was “only as good as my sources.” This logic upends the traditional role of reporting, which should always begin with the assumption that those in power have an agenda and are rarely bound to the truth. All governments lie, as I. F. Stone pointed out, and it is the job of the journalist to do the hard, tedious reporting to expose these lies. It is the job of courtiers to feed off the scraps tossed to them by the powerful and serve the interests of the power elite.

Cramer continues to serve his elite masters by lashing out at government attempts to make the financial system accountable. He has
repeatedly characterized President Obama and Democrats in Congress as Russian communists intent on “rampant wealth destruction.” He has referred to Obama as a “Bolshevik” who is “taking cues from Lenin.” He has also used terms such as “Marx,” “comrades,” “Soviet,” “Winter Palace,” and “Politburo” in reference to Democrats and asked whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the “general secretary of the Communist Party.” On the March 3, 2009, edition of NBC's
Today
, Cramer attacked Obama's purported “radical agenda” and claimed that “this is the most, greatest wealth destruction I've seen by a president.” Statements like these from courtiers like Cramer will grow in intensity as the economic morass deepens and the government is forced to be increasingly interventionist, including the possible nationalization of many banks.