The Dear Old MSM in Their Liberal Bubble

Conservatives love to twit the mainstream media for their bias and their insularity. And now that we really have a voice in the national debate we can afford to be more generous to our adversaries, and humorously represent them as jolly old dinosaurs “asking each other what’s happened to all the tasty fronds,” as Jonah Goldberg does.

He can’t help chuckling as three old dinosaurs, Tim Russert, Ted Koppel, and Tom Brokaw agree with each other about the shocking state of the nation.

These three giants of television journalism tut-tutted about one government failure after another, from the Katrina response to the government’s inability to provide health care for everybody to our dismayingly low taxes. Brokaw agreed with Koppel, Koppel agreed with Brokaw. Russert nodded as one newsman repeated what the other one just said.

But of course, things are in a parlous state, if you are a liberal MSM dinosaur. Things just aren’t the same as in the good old days when what the TV news said was accepted as objective news and there was no way you could escape the liberal bubble.

The trouble is that the liberal bubble leads the MSM not just into tut-tutting, but into seriously flawed journalism, as Michael Barone points out in critiquing The New York Times “Dec. 16 story reporting the National Security Agency intercepts of telephone conversations between terrorism suspects abroad and U.S. citizens or legal residents in the United States. The Times didn’t bother telling its readers this practice is far from new and is entirely legal.”

Let’s put the issue very simply. The president has the power as commander in chief under the Constitution to intercept and monitor the communications of America’s enemies. Indeed, it would be a very weird interpretation of the Constitution to say the commander in chief could order U.S. forces to kill America’s enemies but not to wiretap -- or, more likely these days, electronically intercept -- their communications. Presidents have asserted and exercised this power repeatedly and consistently over the last quarter-century.

In the old days, the Times could get away with this, because there would never be a chance for the conservative case to see the light of day. But not any more. Within a day or two of the Dec 16 Times story, conservatives had posted on the web examples of Democratic presidents—not just the evil Bush—invoking the power to do warrantless intercepts of foreign powers, and the MSM has been on defense ever since.