Turning the page

‘They won’t be missed’ seems to be the conclusion of several people whose opinions I value on the topic of the decline and fall of the nation’s newspapers. Jack Shafer in Slate asks what’s so essential about the printed sheet to the preservation of democracy, and my old bud Marc Cooper defends the blogosphere as collectively at least as coherent and defensible as the ‘professional’ reporter class led by people like Judith Miller who peddled the pack of lies that brought us the Iraq war. (In all fairness to Miller, newspaper jingoism and war-promotion goes back quite a long way.) Glenn Greenwald at Salon regularly chimes in with similar tunes.

Here’s a fascinating addition to that discussion: John Mearsheimer writes in the London Review of Books this week that the Israel lobby suffered a setback in its successful campaign to trash Charles Freeman and keep him away from the chair of the National Intelligence Council, the body that produces those pesky National Intelligence Estimates saying Iran in fact is not building nuclear weapons. Mearsheimer is half of the team (along with Stephen Walt) who wrote a book about the oversized influence of the Israeli right on American policy, previewed last year in a huge excerpt in the same LRB after The Atlantic buckled and spiked it.

Mearsheimer points out that although the Israel lobby did manage to bury the Freeman nomination when Obama failed to back him up (in contrast with Obama’s tenacious, ongoing defense of creepy Tim Geithner), it was exposed in the process and did not succeed in browbeating its opponents into silence or retraction. Jimmy Carter led the way in this regard with his book calling Israeli policy a form of apartheid, and Mearsheimer is encouraged by the fact that bloggers, no less, stood up to the Likud bullies.

Mainstream media—that is, the newspapers we’re supposed to be mourning—largely ignored the whole incident, which makes them complicit with the lobby’s desire to kill off unwelcome appointments without leaving fingerprints. But blogs were afire with the story and, as Mearsheimer notes, were not intimidated into silence: ‘A vigorous, well-informed and highly regarded array of bloggers defended Freeman at every turn’ until the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Lieberman and the other Democratic stand-bys weighed in and finished the job for the Israelis.

‘The lobby never has had much trouble keeping the New York Times and the Washington Post in line, but it has few ways to silence critics on the internet’, says Mearsheimer. I gather he’s not lamenting the death of the Cincinnati Post.