Drowning Journalism in a Bathtub

Or just shooting at them on the battlefield, whatever.

Salon's got a good article today about the Bush administration's media strategy: smear them, laugh at them, subvert them, ignore them, and humiliate them, and then drown the whole damn lot of them in the bathtub. Who needs reporters?

The systematic effort to undercut journalists, to strip them of their traditional influence in national affairs, represents the Bush administration taking steps to "decertify" the professional press corps by "trying to unseat the idea that these people, professional journalists assigned to cover politics, have a legitimate role to play in our politics," according to Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University. He views that effort, along with James Guckert's (aka Jeff Gannon's) ascension at White House press briefings, as being closely linked: "Creating 'Jeff Gannon' as a credible White House correspondent and creating radical doubt about the intentions of mainstream journalists (in order to decertify the traditional press) are two parts of the same effort."

Oh, while you're at Salon, read this exchange between Chris Cox and Michelle Goldberg about his speech at CPAC.