The media have not yet been adequately bashed

James Walcott has a way with words and these few capture for me the problem with the press "corpse":

As Daily Howler’s Bob Somerby reminds us with the persistence of a saint, we have a disastrously unserious press corps fatuously amused with itself.

Reading Somerby today, he cites a Krugman column (unfortunately it's behind the NYTimes subscription wall) which says:

Krugman:

“An Inconvenient Truth” isn't just about global warming, of course. It's also about Mr. Gore. And it is, implicitly, a cautionary tale about what's been wrong with our politics.

Why, after all, was Mr. Gore's popular-vote margin in the 2000 election narrow enough that he could be denied the White House? Any account that neglects the determination of some journalists to make him a figure of ridicule misses a key part of the story. Why were those journalists so determined to jeer Mr. Gore? Because of the very qualities that allowed him to realize the importance of global warming, many years before any other major political figure: his earnestness, and his genuine interest in facts, numbers and serious analysis.

And so the 2000 campaign ended up being about the candidates' clothing, their mannerisms, anything but the issues, on which Mr. Gore had a clear advantage (and about which his opponent was clearly both ill informed and dishonest).

I won't join the sudden surge of speculation about whether ''An Inconvenient Truth'' will make Mr. Gore a presidential contender. But the film does make a powerful case that Mr. Gore is the sort of person who ought to be running the country.

Since 2000, we've seen what happens when people who aren't interested in the facts, who believe what they want to believe, sit in the White House. Osama bin Laden is still at large, Iraq is a mess, New Orleans is a wreck. And, of course, we've done nothing about global warming.

But can the sort of person who would act on global warming get elected? Are we—by which I mean both the public and the press—ready for political leaders who don't pander, who are willing to talk about complicated issues and call for responsible policies? That's a test of national character. I wonder whether we'll pass.

Somerby then concludes:

Oh yes, “The Editors” are in highest dudgeon in this fine piece of work! Boldly posturing—pretending to fight—they type the first half of Krugman’s column, the part which hasn’t yet let us know that the mainstream press corps has been behind the long, outrageous War Against Gore. Go ahead—read what they write! They buy you off by shaking their fists at the latest, easy right-wing targets. But they forget to report what actually matters; they forget to say that the War Against Gore was conducted, not by some right-wing think tank, but by those jeering scribes in that press room—the ones who “groaned, howled and laughed” at almost everything Gore said, then made up those stories about him.

Why do “The Editors” neglect to tell you? Let’s guess—they’re still protecting their future careers! After all, the people discussed in Krugman’s column are, in fact, the corps’ Biggest Players—the people who decide which brilliant young scribes will go on to have multimillion-dollar careers. So even this week, even now, Peter Beinart still won’t tell you—won’t explain what has actually happened to Gore. He invites you to rail at those easy targets—and forgets to name the hard ones. He forgets to name the people who have actually been running this war—the people who will make his career, the people who will make him very famous.