Fourth Estate of Privilege Journalists want special rights

NRO ^ | 12-08-2004 | Jonah Goldberg

[RepCath]

Maybe you haven't noticed, but the mainstream media are suffering from the perception that they're just the teeniest bit arrogant. Oh, who am I kidding? They behave like they're nobles or a priestly class. Dan Rather, Brian Williams, and Peter Jennings might as well wear flowing ermine robes. From their palaces in midtown Manhattan they determine what the peasants see and read. They regard upstarts such as National Review, Fox News, and — shudder — bloggers as little more than a motley collection of heretics, Anabaptists, and barbarians.

In the Middle Ages, aristocrats and clerics were protected by a panoply of rules and customs — sumptuary laws, for example — that separated them from the peons. Henry VIII declared that no man below the rank of earl could "wear cloth of gold or silver, or silk of purple color" in an effort to maintain a color-coding system for the lower classes.

[1john2 3and4]

But now liberals are furious that journalists might actually have to help the investigation they demanded
and

What's particularly ironic is that the big-media lawyers fear the courts will allow a blanket shield for journalists because there's no way to exclude one-man-band web journalists — bloggers — from the new right. And what's the point of giving the nobility a new privilege if any peasant can take advantage of it, too?

Good stuff! We have flashlights (while we rummage around in our pajamas), they HATE light.

[OldFriend]

Wearing ermine robes.....but they're still naked!

[Travis McGee]

Flashlights? We have WAY better than flashlights, thanks to JimRob!

[Paleo Conservative]

But in all of this debate, what people seem to be overlooking is that journalists aren't always analogous to witnesses to crimes. Sometimes they're accomplices. Imagine that a vindictive government official wants to embarrass an opponent by leaking his tax returns. He steals them from confidential files and meets a reporter from the Times in a back alley. The reporter publishes them. It seems to me the reporter isn't a witness, he's an accessory. If it makes it easier to understand the point, imagine instead of tax returns it's plans for a cheap nuclear weapon al Qaeda could make.