The Lesson Of The Village

Doug at Balloon Juice analyzes the whole Marc Ambinder/Marcy Wheeler situation (Ambinder basically pleads stupid to the fact he was going with the Village flow on the Tom Ridge story at the time and Wheeler slices him to ribbons for it) and opines:

But for me, the most important take away, is that we live in a world where journalists get ahead more by clinging to the right-center conventional wisdom than by actually finding out the truth. It’s quite literally better, careerwise, to be wrong all the time.

And quite frankly he's right. For the most part the Villagers who were dead wrong about the Bushies and the ongoing flood of post-Dubya-as-President revelations are the same ones still calling the shots today: Brooks, Broder, Dowd, Kristol, Friedman, David Gregory, all of FOX News, etc. Those who were right are gone from the center of power: Froomkin being the most obvious example, but the flood of bloggers and voices on the left who were more than correct about the last 6 years are nothing more than curiosities. The Village power structure is completely intact despite these trusted journalists being nothing more than the Bush White House's steno pool. Claiming incompetence like Ambinder did is just doubly bad, as it was painfully obvious to any objective observer at the time that Bush was using the terror alert levels to scare voters into voting Republican. Either Ambinder is a stooge or incompetent...and yet he's still a respected journalist.

Too many of these "respected journalists" are still in positions of power. Too many of the people who told the truth over the last several years are not. What's the point of a free press at all then?