Are You on the Team?

I was wondering why I was watching Mark Lebovich's interview on C-SPAN twice today.  Maybe because there wasn't much on Morning Joe.  Maybe because there's really not much in the newspaper today. But I've heard conversations about his book This Town a number of times and I figured, why not get it straight from the horses mouth.  So I listened.





On my second listen I stopped the video.  This clip right here made me fully nauseous:

The Team.  I often wonder why when I watch the PBS Newshour I feel like a starving kid finally getting a meal.  I am a citizen finally getting the information I need.  Often I watch "the news" but feel I'm fed a diet of junk food, histrionics, opinion, and sometimes, more often than I care to really count, I feel that I'm purposefully mislead.  But like any sane person I sit and tell myself that's not true, it must be me.  Then Mr. Leibovich tells me that it's not just me.  And nausea sets in.  The press and the government seem to be the exact same source, a Janus coin, one being speaking with two mouths.

So I went back and looked at the Michael Hastings piece:

And to be fair I then looked at the Lara Logan piece on CNN:

For starters, I didn't know there was a club.  I didn't know there was an inside.  I didn't know as a reader that there was this preservation of relationships that goes on "Inside" Washington.  

To be honest I don't know really how to take this.  The idea behind the Constitution is that the press is given freedom in order to inform the people.  It's still happening but it seems, even according to Leibovich that those that do the best reporting aren't the reporters who are "inside" or on "the Team" but rather those reporters who are outside or were when they did their best work:

Woodward and Bernstein

Michael Hastings

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras

It seems that it is the outsiders that are doing the best work.  These are the reporters who are the most trusted I believe precisely because they are outside.  They don't follow the rules because the rule should be to bring the American people the truth.

Here's another example of the insider versus the outsider.  Are you really a journalist if you're not on the Team?

Perhaps now I know why I don't watch the "news" much. I never seem to get much information from it.  Perhaps now I know why.