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The comedian Jon Stewart, who hosts his popular "Daily Show' 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 leveraging used to make fortunes for CEOs out of the retirement and savings accounts of ordinary Americans.
Cramer, like most television and many print reporters, provides an uncritical forum to the powerful. At the same time they provide the forum, 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 corrupt kind of quid pro quo: The media get access to the elite as long as the media courtiers faithfully report what the elite wants reported. Without that quid pro quo, 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 "courtiers" 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. While they pretended to serve the public, they actually served the power elite, just as Cramer and most of those on television do today.
In Bill Moyers' 2007 PBS documentary Buying the War, Moyers asked Meet the Press host Tim Russert why he had passed on these lies without vetting them. Even more damaging, Moyers 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, where Cheney had the audacity to cite the Times article to substantiate what he was telling Tim Russert!
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post suggested that Russert's journalistic failure, in allowing these lies to pass, unvetted, indicated a larger failure of many media figures: "More and more, in the media, become, I think, common carriers of administration statements, rather than critics of the administration. We've sort of given up being independent and on our own."
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 any real journalist to do the hard, tedious work necessary to expose these lies. On the other hand, it is the relatively easy and well paid job of courtiers to feed off the scraps and BS tossed to them by the powerful so that they can best serve the interests of the power elite that pays them so well.
Cramer, formerly of Goldman Sachs, 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," "WinterPalace," and "Politburo" in reference to Democrats, and has 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 our economic morass deepens and the government is forced to be increasingly interventionist, perhaps including the nationalization of many banks.
It is not just one or two reporters or television hosts who are corrupt. The media institutions themselves are corrupt. In the weeks before the occupation of Iraq, media workers were too busy posturing as red-blooded American patriots to report. They rarely challenged the steady assault by the Bush White House against our civil liberties and the trashing of our Constitution. The role of courtiers, after all, is to parrot official propaganda. Courtiers do not defy the elite or question the structure of the (corporate) state. The corporations, in return, use the power of television to make them into multimillionaire celebrities and allow them into their inner circle. Historically, no class of courtiers, from the eunuchs behind the Manchus in the nineteenth century to the Baghdad caliphs of the Abbasid caliphate, has ever transformed itself into a responsible and socially productive class. Mainly they are, and always have been, merely flaks, PR agents, propagandists and apologists for the rich and powerful. Very well paid and famous, yes "" but essentially corrupt.
In modern America, the rise of courtiers extends beyond the press
Elected officials govern under the pretense that they serve the public, while with a few exceptions they actually work on behalf of corporations. Example: In 2008, a Congress with a majority of Democrats passed the FISA bill, which provides immunity for the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the National Security Agency's illegal surveillance over the previous six years. Such a bill endangers the work of journalists, human rights workers, crusading lawyers, and whistle-blowers who attempt to expose abuses the government seeks to hide. This bill means we will never know the extent of the Bush White House's violation of our civil liberties. Worst of all, since the bill gives the U.S. government a license to eavesdrop on our phone calls and e-mails, it effectively demolishes our right to privacy. Even worse, these private communications can be stored indefinitely and sent to any government agency. In short, the bill will make it possible for those in power to identify and silence anyone who dares to make information public that defies official propaganda or exposes fraud or abuse of power. But the telecommunications corporations, which spent some $15 million in lobbying fees, wanted the bill passed, so their courtiers in Congress passed it.
Being a courtier requires agility and eloquence. The most talented of them should at least be credited as great actors. They entertain us. They make us feel good. They persuade us and pretend to be our friends. They are the smiley faces of a corporate state that has hijacked our government. When the corporations make their iron demands, these courtiers drop to their knees. They placate the telecommunications companies that want to be protected from well deserved lawsuits. They permit oil and gas companies to rake in obscene profits and keep in place the vast subsidies of corporate welfare doled out by the state which they increasingly control. They allow our profit-driven health-care system to leave the uninsured and underinsured to suffer and die without proper care. What the elite wants, it gets, thanks to the well compensated service of their loyal courtiers.
Stupidly we trust courtiers wearing face powder who deceive us in the name of journalism. We trust courtiers in our political parties who promise to fight for our interests even as they pass bill after bill to further corporate fraud and abuse. Quite mistakenly we assume that our courtiers are providing us with real information, facts, and knowledge. This is the danger of a culture awash in lies and pseudo-events: Truth becomes ever more elusive, ever less certain. And so it was that the Democratic Party was able to refuse to impeach Bush and Cheney. This collective hiding from the truth also allows our government to spy on us without warrants or cause, and funnel billions of our taxpayer dollars to the very investment firms that committed fraud against us. Meanwhile, quite incredibly, these well paid courtiers baldly tell us that our government and corporations treasure democracy and stand up for the protection of our civil rights. Their unending lies have become a form of collective abuse. And, as so often happens in the weird pathology of victim and victimizer, we keep coming back for more.
America's transformation from a manufacturing economy to an economy of consumption
Our political and economic decline took place by way of a corporate drive for massive deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the country's radical transformation from a manufacturing economy to an economy of consumption. Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized the danger this posed. He sent a message to Congress as long ago as April 29,1938, titled "Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power." In it he wrote:
Democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of (corporate) power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism -- ownership of Government by a group or any controlling private power. Neither is Democracy safe if its business system cannot provide employment, and produce and distribute goods in such a way, as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.
The corporate state, the security state, and the imminent birth of fascism in America
