"David Broder is the voice of the people."

Another brilliant dissection of the corrupt national media by Glenn Greenwald at salon.com:


http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/05/09/broder/index.html


Radar Online has a new profile of presidential candidate Mike Gravel. The article recounts what happened when the reporter, Jebediah Reed, basically followed Gravel as he was profiled by The Today Show.

The article is amusing in general, but Reed recounts this unbelievably revealing incident along the way:

Beaming after the Columbia event, Gravel walks with Alter to a nearby Cuban restaurant for a late lunch. On the way they encounter a gray-haired gentleman in owlish glasses. Alter greets him very respectfully. "This is Tom Edsall," he says. Edsall was a senior political writer for the Washington Post for 25 years. He retired from the paper in 2006 and now writes for the New Republic and teaches at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Gravel smiles broadly and says, "Hey, can you straighten out David Broder?" Broder, an influential columnist at the Post and the unofficial godfather of the D.C. press corps, has been a target of much criticism from liberal blogs for seeming to provide political cover for Bush on Iraq, even with a majority of Americans now opposing the war. "He doesn't believe in the power of the people!" Gravel says.

Edsall blinks and looks perplexed. "David Broder is the voice of the people," he replies matter-of-factly. Gravel starts to smile, assuming Edsall is making an absurdist joke. But Edsall is not joking. The two men look at each other in awkward silence over a great gulf of unshared beliefs, then Gravel chuckles and walks ahead into the restaurant.

I would be willing to wager that the vast majority of Beltway journalists agree with Edsall -- that Broder is a real, true, salt-of-the-earth representative "of the people." That's more or less what Joe Klein said recently in praise of Broder:

No, what I most like about Broder as a reporter is that he has taken pains over the years to talk at length with the sort of people who don't go to protests, and even to folks who don't go to political meetings in Iowa and New Hampshire. He'll actually go door to door, or convene a group of neighbors, to find out what's important to them.


See, Broder knows how the "ordinary people" think because he leaves the Beltway and goes and studies them real up close like farm animals and then comes back to Washington and publishes his findings about the behavioral patterns of this odd species known as "the people."

...

The greatest and most fictitous conceit of the Beltway media class is that they are the real voice of What Americans Think. Man of the People Rick Stengel of Time will simply take his own personal views and falsely claim that this is "what voters want to see." David Brooks does that constantly, as do people like Andrea Mitchell. And the painfully self-conscious obsessions which Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, and Maureen Dowd (among others) have with trying to demonstrate what salt-of-the-earth regular people they are is depressingly familiar, not to mention glaringly false.

...

What's Broder's problem, anyway? Is it just that he's out of touch? I think it may be that simple.

Apparently for him that's as good as being "the voice of the people."

edit: the 1956 movie, not the more modern connotation.

Current feelings about Iraq are not about how we got in but how * botched the job so badly. Most feel we should carpet bomb and level any neighborhood with and IDE attack or get the hell out.

I think Broder is much closer to what is going on than we want to hear.

Or at least in the world you revolve in?

Broder's world invovles power, money, access and corporate cronyism...and that is a lot closer to the people?

I know one B52 guy who offered to go back in if they would let him.

And see how all that bombing did in Vietnam and Korea...sure won us big there didn't it?

Sheesh...I thought Curtis LeMay was long gone. I know several Viet Nam and now Iraq Vets and almost to a man (and woman) they resent the mismanagement of this war by a bunch of draft dodgers and how our military has been abused by this regime.

No wonder so much of teh world thinks of us as every bit insanely fanatical as AQ. The people you are around show an astonishing lack of compassion and intelligence. Hey heres an idea you could pass along.. why dont they just all get together and start their own armed group and go over and do all the bombing and killing themselves?? Remind them they will have to basically kill every last Muslim though...however Im pretty sure genocide is just fine by them and Im also sure that the fact that what they propose makes them look no different than any other violent sadistic murderous minded fanatics.

sarcasm aside... tell them this instead "dont become what you hate, love is the way to liberate"... probably to pansy-ish for them though.

and do their utmost to promote those self-destroying attitudes, I don't think anything good can come from that tactic (other than for Corporate Fascism). Even if "most" are insane, that is no reason to join them.

me fall in love with Mike Gavel! That and previous things I've read about on DU. Somebody understands what the FUCK is goin' on!~

tome edsall reminds me of another reason why I wouldn't pick up tnr if I had to trip over it.

david broder has an agenda, baby, and it's not mine..it's called "trying to stay undercover corporatemediawhore, but not doin' a very good job at it". In spite of people like tom edsall and joeblow klein who are telling us we have lying eyes.

he wrote this fawning piece on Lee Asswater's plan to win over black voters and thus end the Democrats' advantage with them. Then, a matter of days later, there was a massive sit-in among Howard University's African-American students to protest Atwater's being named to the board of trustees there, and he had to withdraw.

I'd say Broder jumped the shark, but as far as I can tell he's always been like this. What is he, like 172 years old? He's the voice of the people who are deep, deep, deep inside the Beltway.

Bwahahahaha