Everything's Fineman

There is nothing quite like listening to an apex mediawhore wax self righteously pontifical about the sins of Jayson Blair the New York Times' acknowledged fabulist.
Now on the surface Howard Fineman (today's name guest on the Imus show) was doing nothing more than hyping the current Newsweek with a lavish cover story about the Blair Affair....and after all said magazine IS one of his two major sources of income...a reporter has to eat and eat lavishly don'cha know.
And Imus' program is simulcast on MSNBC which is Howard's other big weekly paycheck - so right away the synergy potential is endless.
However after a few minutes, it was clear this was no simple case of press puffery.
Oh no, Fineman enacted the classic media whore cliche' of raising "new, troubling, and unanswered questions" about Howell Raines' tenure as Managing Editor of the New York Times. Howard claimed to be anonymously quoting various Timesvolk who lamented Raines' love of pushy hype artists like Jayson Blair.
A lovely insinuation BTW, Fineman mentions no specifics of any kind, yet still manages to imply there were other Jayson Blair types still working for the Times and that moral has plummeted in the newsroom.
HA!
When it comes to clever harassment like this, Fineman is a Jedi Master.
So right away you can see who is the real target, it's an ongoing mission among serious conservatives to subject the top swank at the New York Times to as much rhetorical intimidation as the laws of the Republic will allow. This current situation is therefore a huge opportunity to beat the Great Grey Lady to the curb with impunity.
Now, it's pretty clear that Fineman is a media whore, that I will not dispute.
But why do these guys act the way they do?
Now Mediawhores on line has a fairly comprehensive explanation, most of these wankers are conducting covert ideological warfare under the pose of authentic journalism as a means to riches and advancement.
In the current vertically integrated corporate it simply pays better to be a biased reporter than an honest one.
Media whores are to be distinguished from outright conservative editorialists/propagandists by their tattered pretense to reliable objectivity.
Therefore, Tim Russert is a media whore (he is always tougher on democrats than he is on republicans when they appear on Meet the Press) but George Will is not...(because his ideological preferences are hanging out for all to see).
The MWO version is a mixture of status seeking and bias...you mix in the thirty year long conservative ascendency and there is our current crisis in all it's glory.
I have a slightly different view...MWO sees conservatism as universal and triumphant, I say it is a dying ideology in America. The endless corrupt bargains DC republicans made in an effort to illegally depose Bill Clinton and the abject capitulation the movement made to La Famiglia Arbusto, have put conservatism as we know it on the high road to an ugly annihilation.
Now, mind you this doesn't mean liberals are gonna inherit the earth or anything. No I suspect something worse than conservatism will sweep the field, unless of course we start getting our act together.
The reason the Russerts and Finemans are smearing and sneering so frantically is that they know a storm is coming and they are trying to make their money now before the deluge.
That and the fact that they all have a ingrained snitch mentality that goes deeper than any mere ideological bias.
Snitchery has a long and unhallowed history in this country, it's traditionally the only form of power available to the feeble and angry. Everyone should listen closely to the Imus show in the morning, you can almost feel Fineman's nasty snarky exultation as he lays down some vile dish about the Clintons. Fineman is a low rent snitch in many ways, he doesn't do it for the money, although that is a nice by product of the process. No Howard would drop a dime on anyone even if he was homeless, for someone with his vengeful disposition it provides a necessary feeling of power and triumph-passive nuclear aggression as it were.

Such is the
Kingdom of Heaven
On the Congressionally Licensed Airwaves
And Elsewhere
5-20-03
7:50am EST