Greenwald's schtick is increasingly terrifying. His neverending epiphany, which arrives each day and without fail, like the rising of the sun--is that, holy shit, the media propogandizes on behalf of the government. (The government, Glenn, not the GOP.) Finding a gloss on some new police-state tactic in Time magazine, of all places, should not shock a man. It's like being surprised at a well-reviewed military parade in Pravda. I mean, not to suggest that the state is only a network of power structures, needless to say, best understood holistically and organically, not as a machine but as an organism, simultaneously divided against itself and unified in the common purpose of survival and growth, capable of mediating internal tensions and disagreements to that point, able to acquire new skills and competencies, adaptive and intelligent, sometimes rational and sometimes reactionary, instinctively but not universally territorial, with some physical centers of great importance and others of vestigial uselessness, a totality of abstract powers ideated and actualized by the collective action of human beings, themselves only the material functionaries of a self-perpetuating, self-referencing, self-defining, self-circumscribing, suprahuman entity. How do you like them fucking apples, Gleen Greenwald? To look at the state of human affairs right now and conclude that the real problem is that people like Joe Klein are willing to swallow a government line, when obviously the very purpose of the entire economic sector for which the Joe Kleins of the world toil is precisely to mold, variate, amplify, and disseminate a very particular kind of information, is to find yourself not only missing the forest for the trees, but the trees for one moldy leaf rotting in a puddle on the lee side of a dank Appalachian hill.

It's all very clever, and it's pretty much true. It's very easy to adopt a kind of helpless holistic cynicism. It's easy to feel contempt, if not pity, for poor saps that take to the streets with silly anti-Bush signs thinking they're going to change the course of the energy wars.

But there is another way of looking at it. Joe Klein isn't insignificant. As opinion leaders go, he's pretty high up the totem pole. And he's dangerous precisely because he is not what he appears to be. It's simply not true that every columnist/reporter at Time or similar outfits is acting/performing like Joe Klein.

Klein's role is 'concern troll'. Here's one definition:

Concern Troll: A person who posts on a blog thread, in the guise of "concern," to disrupt dialogue or undermine morale by pointing out that posters and/or the site may be getting themselves in trouble, usually with an authority or power. They point out problems that don't really exist. The intent is to derail, stifle, control, the dialogue. It is viewed as insincere and condescending.

That is exactly what Klein does. He takes on a role as a concerned Democrat. He then accuses the Democrats of doing things that they are not doing, or repeats dishonest Republican critiques. And the idea is to get the Democrats to act more like Republicans, or cave in to whatever it is the Republicans want. IOZ thinks we're clueless.

holy shit, the media propogandizes on behalf of the government. (The government, Glenn, not the GOP.)

But that is precisely wrong. Joe Klein was playing the exact same role during the Clinton administration, only against the government. If Klein has hidden masters, they aren't 'the government'.

It's important to educate people about BOTH features of corporate news. Yes, there is an inherent bias in favor of whatever the government says, especially on matters of foreign policy and national (even internal) security. This is combined in an unhealthy way with an unreflective (Hugo Chavez is Hitler) pro-corporate bias. We should expect nothing but self-serving crap from Bigfoot corporate reporters when they report on these areas. People need to know that.

But, they also need to know that there are charlatans out there that are playing a role as members of the left, yet are really just serving as inept sidekicks in a faux left/right debate. To put it in scientific terms, it's like having a debate about astrophysics, where one side is represented by Steven Hawking and the other by your garbage man. Only...your garbage man is posing as a PhD. (see Alan Colmes).

This kind of stacking the deck is endemic, if not at all unpredictable, and it's an important and essential job of the blogosphere to expose it and educate people about it. And it's not just about Klein being a phony. It's about the infrastructure of the media that allows him to get away with printing lies and inaccuracies. If you call up his editor, you get this:

I’ve spent all morning on the phone trying to figure out who the editor at Time Magazine was on Joe Klein’s FISA column (the one Klein has now written about five times, fully admitting he never read the original bill). I finally confirmed that the editor was Priscilla Painton, and called her and identified myself. I asked her what the editing process was, and how a piece with so many errors made it into print.

“That assumes that there are errors,” she said. And hung up on me.

Her number is 212-522-2022.

Understanding Priscilla Painton is important. What the hell is her problem? Is she self-consciously aware that her job is 'precisely to mold, variate, amplify, and disseminate a very particular kind of information' and that that information is false and serves Republican interests?

Or is she just somehow a puppet whose invisible strings are pulled by an "an organism, simultaneously divided against itself and unified in the common purpose of survival and growth, capable of mediating internal tensions and disagreements to that point, able to acquire new skills and competencies, adaptive and intelligent, sometimes rational and sometimes reactionary, instinctively but not universally territorial, with some physical centers of great importance and others of vestigial uselessness, a totality of abstract powers ideated and actualized by the collective action of human beings, themselves only the material functionaries of a self-perpetuating, self-referencing, self-defining, self-circumscribing, suprahuman entity"?

And, regardless of how you answer that question, shouldn't she be fired for her lack of journalistic standards? Or is that as "uncannily idiotic as any sentence among all the terrabytes of florid concern from the many mouths of Donkledom"?

Update [2007-11-27 13:33:50 by Steven D]: For those of you so inclined the managing editor of Time Magazine, and presumably Joe Klein's boss, is Richard Stengel. If you would like to email Mr. Stengel regarding the serious lapse of journalistic ethics and practices evidenced by Joke Line, his email address is richard_stengel@timemagazine.com. My email to Mr. Stengel follows:

(cont.)

Update #2 below the fold.