See, it's like professional wrestling...

In my post yesterday about pundits not only not supporting but actually agitating against actual investigations into wrongdoing, I quoted Jane Hamsher's thesis that it's the pundits complicity in the wrongdoing that is at the root of their resistance. However, Glenn Greenwald offers the explanation that it is also the fact that the pundits actually identify more with the people they pontificate about than they do with those for whom they ostensibly are doing the bloviating.

There seems to be an emerging consensus among the coddled, effete Beltway media stars that it would be highly improper and uncouth for the Democrats -- should they take over one or both houses of Congress in November -- to launch investigations into the various, thus-far-uninvestigated lawbreaking and corruption scandals surrounding the Bush administration. Regardless of political differences -- which the Beltway media will allow -- the media stars are proclaiming that Democrats should pledge in advance not to engage in any of that nasty investigative business.

[...]

The media is supposed to be inherently pro-investigation. It's intended to be an investigative body, to subject government conduct to aggressive scrutiny and be devoted to the exposure of information which the Government is attempting to conceal from its citizens. To listen to these media stars effetely condemn investigations as though they're something which only hateful, rabble-rousing radicals would want to pursue tells you all you need to know about how fundamentally broken the national media is.

The reality is that people like Tim Russert and Chris Wallace are so entrenched in the national political Beltway system that it becomes the first source for how they perceive themselves. They are not journalists first. They are national Beltway stars first. As a result, they don't see high government officials as their adversaries because those high government officials are part of the same Beltway elite institutions and are their friends, partners and allies before they are anything else.

Journalists like Russert identify with the political figures they are supposed to be investigating and fighting against more than they identify with anyone else. They see them as their partners, as one of them -- all members of the same Beltway elite institution which is the source of their wealth, their fame, their prestige, their self-esteem. They derive everything that matters to them from that institution, and so that institution is the one that demands their principal allegiance and becomes the principal source of their identities. And while those who are assigned the journalist part in the Beltway Play will go through the motions of playing their roles -- pretending to question political figures aggressively, to disclose secret facts about them, etc. -- they really feel affinity and friendship and affection more than they feel anything else towards them.

That is why they find the idea of mean-spirited investigations so distasteful and wrong. It's one thing to play the role of having political disagreements with someone. Like WWF wrestling, the rules of the game are well-known to everyone and as long as everyone abides by those groundrules, it's all in good fun. They entertain the crowd with their faux conflict and nobody gets hurt. But investigations hurt people. Sometimes, people get accused of criminal behavior! They have to pay for lawyers which can be really expensive. It impacts their lives and can really harm a person's career, so it's out-of-bounds.

Accusing someone of being inept or wrong -- sure, that's all good, clean fun. But prosecutors and subpoenas and accusations of criminal wrongdoing -- that's just nasty. It disrupts the fun and it's unnecessarily mean. Besides, they personally know all the gentlemen and ladies in the Bush administration - they've met their spouses and kids, laughed together at the same jokes, helped their friends and associates get jobs. These are good people, even if they are politically wrong. They are not corrupt and they are not criminals, and it is wrong to treat them as such.