Peridyd's Progress

For those of us who are old enough to remember when the Fourth Estate maintained an adversarial relationship (rather than cocktail-party friendship) with whatever government was in power, the last 15 years of news-watching have been frustrating indeed.

My friend Rob forwarded this excellent article to me from the Huffington Post. It appears that American Morning producer Chez Pazienza has been dooced by CNN.

To say that Mr. Pazienza has not gone quietly into that dark night would be a bit of an understatement, but perhaps I'm a bit biased, since he's so deftly skewering an institution that I feel has been so cynically screwing the self-same viewing public that it's ostensibly serving.

I'll provide this brief excerpt, which will hopefully whet your appetite for what is one of the best political tracts that I've read in a long time.

During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what's worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, "What can we do to not lead with Iraq?" -- the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn't always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I'd "increased shareholder value." (For the record, if you're a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word "shareholders," let alone be reminded that you're beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public -- to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up -- and that's not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.