The media February 1994
Fornigate follies
On David Brock’s report on Bill Clinton’s sex life in The American Spectator & media reaction to it.
Why don’t we elect journalists? Once there may have been a time when the most respectable and authoritative of them truly aspired to that chimera, “objectivity,” but even then such objectivity would have been circumscribed by capitalist, ethnocentric, and patriarchal assumptions as yet unrevealed to us by the modern literary sciences. There is not much point in being even-handed and “fair” (the very idea bespeaks the ethos of sentimental, games-playing British imperialism) as between, say, Republican and Democrat if R and D are merely the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the decadent, bourgeois, racist, patriarchal power structure. I grant all this. But the more or less unashamed advocacy that has taken the place of a hypocritical attachment to non-partisanship brings with it problems of its own. A parliament of hacks might be the only solution.
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