The good news for readers of the Los Angeles Times came April 9 when columnist Rosa Brooks announced she was writing her last column.
The bad news for the rest of us came when she announced she was going on to accept a job as an adviser to the undersecretary of defense for policy.
The first question: What expertise does Rosa Brooks have to qualify her to advise the undersecretary of defense for policy?
This is mind-boggling to me. Has she ever served in the military? Has she ever worked in defense? Do you feel safer knowing a Los Angeles Times columnist is helping to craft defense policy?
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But it gets worse from there.
Rosa Brooks used her last column at the L.A. Times to urge government to use taxpayer money to bail out her former industry – newspapers.
She says she "can't imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the news industry has more or less collapsed."
That is a very strange comment coming from someone who is taking a job advising the undersecretary of defense for policy.
Isn't a nuclear attack more dangerous?
Isn't an electro-magnetic attack on the country more dangerous?
Isn't a mega-terrorist attack more dangerous?
Isn't an economic collapse of the country more dangerous?
In fact, isn't a government-owned, government-controlled press more dangerous?
You bet it is.
Now, look, I take a backseat to no one in proclaiming the importance of a free press to a free people. I wrote a book about the subject. I've devoted my life to the proposition and lived it.
But this world in which we live is a dangerous place. And, obviously, the new Pentagon official, according to her own words, doesn't understand that.
She also demonstrates a shocking ignorance of the difference between a free and independent watchdog press and lapdog press that is bought and paid for by government.
The former is essential to a free society. The latter is anathema to a free society.
"If newspapers become mostly infotainment websites – if the number of well-trained investigative journalists dwindles still further – and if we're soon left with nothing but the yapping heads who dominate cable 'news' and talk radio, how will we recognize, or hope to forestall, impending national and global crises?" she writes. "How will we know if government officials have made terrible mistakes, as even the best will sometimes do? How will we know if government officials have told us terrible lies, as the worst have sometimes done? A decimated, demoralized and under-resourced press corps hardly questioned the Bush administration's flimsy case for war in Iraq – and the price for that failure will be paid for generations."
How will we know if government officials have made terrible mistakes?
Are they awake?
How will we know if government officials have told us terrible lies?
Are their lips moving?
Her solution to this imaginary crisis: "It's time for a government bailout of journalism."
Now, it occurs to me that Brooks is laboring under the delusion that newspapers like the one that formerly employed her services are actually doing investigative journalism into government waste, fraud, abuse and corruption. They aren't. They haven't been for a long time.
And this is the very reason they are going bankrupt. No one wants to read them any more – at any price. They have out-served their usefulness.
The central role of a free press in a free society is to serve as a watchdog on government and other powerful institutions. That's why we call the press "the fourth estate." Our founders liked checks and balances. They built them into the governing system they devised in the Constitution. And they also devised, for the first time in human history, special protections for the press – which they hoped would build yet another barrier to tyranny.
And what does Rosa Brooks want to do?
She wants to tear down that barrier.
It's amazing. Yet, I predicted it, because I know these people so well after working shoulder to shoulder with them for so many years. I told you right here there would be calls for government bailouts for newspapers – by the very same people who have been bailing out big government for all these years. And here it is – in black and white and red all over.