The Big Picture and the Closeup

It is easy to imagine now, if TSA had leveled with us about what it proposed to do, what members of the public would have said what they felt about government official using radiation to take revealing pictures of them, and, as an alternative, literally groping their “privates.” TSA would be expected to respond with arguments about the recent attempted “underwear bomber,” and how these searches would make us all safer. And then a policy calculation in which the public was involved and invested could have been made, by an agency better advised about how the public felt.

It is tempting to view the stories told in [Eric] Boehlert’s two books, one chronicling the failure of the mainstream media to report the news and the other revealing the success of the blogs in doing so, as being parts of the same story. Maybe the mainstream media would not be failing from a business perspective were they not, most of the time, failing from a news-reporting perspective as well. Maybe the blogs would not be succeeding, albeit under their mostly profit-agnostic criteria, were they not beginning to seize the standard of bona fide reporting falling from the grasp of the mainstream media as they tumble lifeless upon the field of economic battle.