Glenn Greenwald on Establishment Journalists as Creatures of D.C. and Corporate Culture

And piggybacking on what I just posted re: David Roberts's critique of the straitened, self-serving, and entirely blind worldview of beltway centrist political and media commentary, here's Glenn Greenwald on the same topic.  Greenwald notes that Martha Raddatz stated in the face of abundant and much-discussed proof to the contrary that Medicare and Social Security are "going broke," and spoke of America's "entitlement" programs.  As he notes, she made these demonstrably false (and highly ideological and rightward-skewed statements) because "she's long embedded in the DC culture that equates its own ideological desires with neutral facts."

And here's what results from that rightward skewing of the "objective" discourse of the political and media center, Greenwald notes:

That is what this faux journalistic neutrality, whether by design or otherwise, always achieves. It glorifies highly ideological claims that benefit a narrow elite class (the one that happens to own the largest media outlets which employ these journalists) by allowing that ideology to masquerade as journalistic fact. 

These establishment journalists are creatures of the DC and corporate culture in which they spend their careers, and thus absorb and then regurgitate all of the assumptions of that culture. That may be inevitable, but having everyone indulge the ludicrous fantasy that they are "objective" and "neutral" most certainly is not.

The poor don't ever get mentioned in the current presidential campaign because they don't exist for centrist political and media thinkers.  Out of sight, out of mind.  To the extent that they're imagined at all, they're siphons on the energy and resources of the rich of the nation, because they're sucking up "entitlements" that need to be yanked from them since we're going broke and can't afford an "entitlement culture."  And those entitlements only breed "dependency."

And so the only ones speaking on behalf of the poor and appealing to our consciences to listen to the poor during this campaign cycle are not our religious leaders, our political leaders, or our "objective" centrist mainstream media.  They're marginalized people of faith like American religious women, who are being told by their faith leaders that they don't understand Catholicism or represent it adequately.

Thank God they're there and speaking out--because who would really be representing Catholic values right now in the political spheres if the nuns weren't on the bus?  And who would be giving any voice to the real and serious needs of the least among us?