Lapham recalls the recent past in which a family of a working newspaperman would have felt he had disgraced the profession if more than two people showed up at his funeral. More than 1,500 members of Washington’s carriage trade showed up at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts memorial for Russert, an event organized and covered live by MSNBC. Lapham believes the press used to receive its “accreditation as a fourth estate on the theory that it represented the interests of the citizen as opposed to those of the government.” Russert, to Lapham, was the exact opposite, personifying the oneness of Big Media and the government. Russert served as a “headwaiter,” allowing government officials to pick and choose between courses of silence, spin and rancid lies. He would sagely nod, and then move on, like that of a “trend-setting restaurateur anxious to please his best customer.”
Lapham trashes prominent figures of the D.C. press corps for serving as “de facto members of government, enabling and codependent, their point of view is that of the country’s landlords, their practice equivalent to what is known among Wall Street stock market touts as securitizing the junk.”
He pays tribute to writers in the tradition of Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, I.F. Stone, H.L. Mencken and Hunter Thompson who speak truth to power. Those giants wouldn’t have lasted a day on the Sunday talk show circuit.
On the other hand, they wouldn’t have wanted that gig.
