A cura di @werner58.

Matt Taibbi pubblica in anteprima un capitolo del suo prossimo libro, “Hate Inc. – How, And Why, The Press Makes Us Hate One Another”, nel quale racconta la proliferazione nella stampa contemporanea di articoli che acriticamente riportano fonti anonime di intelligence, spesso fuorvianti o totalmente falsi, evidenziando parallelismi e divergenze col passato.

One of the reasons this trend is worsening has to do with class changes in this business (ironically, this is the subject of this coming week’s chapter).

The old days were obviously no panacea. Reporters until recently almost uniformly were white men, which had an obvious deleterious effect on journalism.

However, back in the day, reporters did tend to come from a different class than the people they reported on in government. A newspaperman in the forties or fifties socially was somewhere between a plumber and the administrator of a typing school. Often he was not college-educated.

Meanwhile, the worthies who established the OSS and later the CIA were almost exclusively products of the Ivy League. The cliches about the Bushes bringing their goofball Skull and Bones sensibility to secret service governance were true.

There was therefore a natural antipathy – at least a little – between some reporters and the self-appointed philosopher kings who worked in secret agencies and spent their days deciding what the world map would look like.

That antipathy is gone today. Reporters, especially national ones, often come from the same schools as FBI and spy chiefs, and they worship the big brains at Langley. There’s an obsession with credentials and resumes that would have made reporters of the Sy Hersh school puke.

So when unnamed “officials” with secret clearances call reporters today, the reporters wet themselves. They’ll print anything they’re told, and they don’t even need to be bribed or intimidated into doing it. This is a major reason these unconfirmable stories are so easy to place today.