Cynicism and vituperation

Just as I had made my way through my evening reading to Atrios's link to the very same post, my friend and correspondent Liz forwarded this to me with the comment: "Reminds me a bit of Letters from a Birmingham Jail, criticizing the liberals for being such a big part of the problem."

An open letter from Attytood in my beloved Philly--the cradle of American independence--to the soi dissant "Dean of American Journalism:"

There was a time in my life when I very much wanted to be you, when I was a young man who wanted your seat one day as one of "the boys on the bus," covering the Making of the Next President. And you were very much a man for those times, the 1970s, when the rise of TV advertising meant that spin would complete the war to replace substance. America needed people like you then – with the right kind of cynicism to cut through all the crap on both sides of the aisle.

But what we used to call "a healthy dose of cynicism" eventually became toxic, for you and for so many of your "gang of 500" inside the Beltway. Somehow, exposing the lies of the system during the Watergate era, when you won a deserved Pulitzer, grew into benign acceptance that politics is pretty much a sport – a sport where, well, everybody lies.

And while you and your new lunch pals at the Palm knew you still had to expose the occasional lie, or at least get worked up about it, to maintain your journalistic credibility, you only went for the low-hanging fruit, the “objective lie,“ the DNA test on a blue dress from the Gap, not the elusive but ultimately false premises that would kill tens of thousands on a bloody war far from most Americans’ sight. Monica Lewinsky allowed you and your friends to prove that journalism was still about exposing...well, exposing something or other.

You, and your colleague Bob Woodward, and so many others, grew to admire the callous art of spincraft you'd been trained to expose -- so much so that when Hurricane Katrina devastated an American city and betrayed a stunning indifference to the fate of the nation's poorest, you could only write that Katrina "opens new opportunities for [Bush]to regain his standing with the public."

Your cynicism hardened as it grew -- to the point where your most famous quote is that "anybody who wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office." Ideas didn’t matter. Do you even remember what you wrote in 2000, when Al Gore gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. You said:

I have to confess, my attention wandered as he went on through page after page of other swell ideas, and somewhere between hate crimes legislation and a crime victim's constitutional amendment, I almost nodded off.

And when “the dean of American journalism” writes that, no wonder that so many voters thought that Gore and George W. Bush were Tweedledee and Tweedledum, or that a protest vote for Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan in what proved to be the closest presidential election in modern American history wouldn’t matter.

But it did matter, didn’t it?

Everything changed, starting on Jan. 20, 2001 and for good just eight months later. You didn’t seem to notice. But some Americans did…even a few journalists.

It goes on from there. It's a must-read. It's also going in the Readings list in the sidebar.