Saturday, January 09, 2021

The Best and the Brightest

"There had been something of a gentleman's agreement among those who might be called The Good Journalists of Washington that the Kennedy Administration was one of excellence, that it was for good things, and against bad things, and that when it did lesser things it was only in self-defense."  - David Halberstam The Best and the Brightest

"One of the things which surprised me was how thin most of the newspaper and magazine reporting of the period was, the degree to which journalists accepted the norms of the government and, particularly in the glamorous Kennedy era, the reputation of these new stars at face value. Credit was given more readily for educational prowess and for academic achievement than for accomplishment in government." - David Halberstam The Best and the Brightest

The above are taken from David Halberstam's  introduction to the 1992 re-publishing of the book. The two paragraphs also easily could have been describing how the media covered the Obama Administration 48-years later. There's also no doubt in my mind if the media had their way it would also be the blueprint for how the Biden Administration would be covered. There's two glaring issues with that though - there's nobody that's going to describe the Biden Administration as "glamorous." Also the number of people who will buy what the media is peddling is much, much less than it was in 1960 or 2008.  

The role of the media is not to inform the public. It never was.

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