The Sanctimonious Self-Importance of the Press

If still fairly young when he began and not in the business for very long Theodore Dreiser still got a deeper understanding of that business than almost anyone will admit to in our day. As he tells us near the end of his recounting of the experience, A Book About Myself, he tells us that even at that early point in his life in which he was trying to make it as a journalist in New York he "knew about the subservience of newspapers to financial interests, their rat-like fear of religionists and moralists, their shameful betrayal of the ordinary man at every point at which he could possibly be betrayed"--and at the same time their "still having the power, by weight of lies and pretense and make-believe, to stir . . . up" that common man "to his own detriment and destruction," a power that they used to the full. Indeed, he confesses to having been "frightened by this very power, which in subsequent years I have come to look upon as the most deadly and forceful of all in nature: the power to masquerade and betray."

It would seem that that "power to masquerade and betray" was in part founded on the press' "air of assurance and righteousness and authority and superiority which overawed and frightened me."

So does all this remain the case today--the news media retaining its powers, and using it in the same irresponsible, corrupt, vicious way, while displaying the same "air of assurance and righteousness and authority and superiority," as we see whenever, in the wake of living down to the lowest expectations of them in the event of the most world-historic of crises, they pat themselves on the back for what a "good job" they did, and smugly brush off any criticism anyone would make of the "mainstream media," sure that the problem must lie with the critics and not such upstanding "adults in the room" as themselves in that self-satisfied centrist way displayed by rags like the New York Times in its degeneration.

One may wonder if these days more people are not sick of the subservience, the cowardice, the betrayal, of which Dresier wrote, and which his contemporaries were already analyzing in detail in ways that ring not just true but depressingly familiar today. After all, even the Establishment-coddling middle-of-the-roaders are looking like they have had enough of these days, to go by what Rebecca Solnit says.

Alas, in the face of the criticisms it seems that they have just gone on getting worse in every way rather than better as they go on congratulating themselves for what a good job they are still doing, and continue to insist that anyone who disagrees with their flattering self-assessment is stupid or deranged or otherwise less than a functional "adult."