News flash, TD, I AM thinking of journalists like Dan Rather whose career got jump-started by reporting on the hurricane in Galveston. His heroism during Hurricane Carla prompted the evacuation of the Texas coast, averting disaster and saving who knows how many lives. If he had not stood in the eye of the storm to report on the danger he might never have had the historic and, please, credit-where-credit-is-due, heroic career that he has had. You’re selecting your details far too narrowly, one might say pedantically if I didn’t admire you so, to prove your overly- pessimistic and, frankly, dreary point.

The link you offer dates from 2004. Not a little ironic given how you’ve on more than one occasion chided me for dredging up anachronistic examples. On May 9, 2009, President Obama charged the US press with the moral equivalent of the Hippocratic oath, Marine motto and Pledge of Allegiance all rolled up into one. Did you somehow miss that? That’s the ground we’re standing on now, not some five-year old whine fest.

I will bet you a martini, shaken not stirred, at the Sky Bar on the roof of the Washington Hotel, that my worldview proves correct and yours is absolutely defunct. I’m banking on serious journalists like Jack Sirica, editor at Newsday, who I don’t have to remind you is the son of Watergate Judge John Sirica. I knew Jack briefly years ago in Washington, and with all respect to his wife, he was hot stuff then and I’m pretty sure he’s even hotter now. That man’s very genes will impel him to conquer this story. You can call guys like him corporate media tools all you want, but I know better. He’s just the man to light the spark on this bonfire of the vanities, and if memory serves, have a ball doing it.

Men like Jack, and there are many others, longstanding print journalists who love their country, who are secure, and in a position to take the lead, drive this fast car and plant their paper’s flag at the pinnacle, aren’t going to idle their engines and waste gas. Not when they can rev them, and floor it into the glory that awaits them just around the next curve.

I think I’ll just have to disagree with you on that one. I must say I admire your faith in your fellow man and woman. I do hope some day to see it rewarded; I fear that day is a longer way off than either of us would like.

Anyway, if one generally wants to advance in their bureaucratic careers, one puts their head down and does what their boss(es) want(s) him or her to do; trying to point out the error of their superiors’ ways or, perhaps, to go all “mavericky” is usually a recipe for career suicide. (Here’s http://www.buzzflash.com/reviews/05/rev05032.html a pretty succinct explanation for the phenomenon for the journalism biz.)
What happens to “mavericky” journalists? Why don’t we ask Ashleigh Banfield, or Dan Rather? The “journalistic profession” has certainly gotten that message, and won’t likely be going all “cutting edge” on any story anytime soon unless their corporate masters want them to.

So… to answer your big question:

Do you really think the members of this intelligent, curious, articulate profession are going to be content with sitting silently on the bench, sidelined while the biggest story, the place where the action is, the main story, and in some sense the Ur story, the only story really worth covering, unfolds without their input and insight?

Well, If they value their career advancement, then the answer is yes, yes they will. And rising unemployment only makes this troubling trend… more troubling.

But what the masters forget, punch-drunk on their own arrogance, is that you can’t keep a good man or a good woman down forever. You just can’t. We’re hardwired for liberty. Humiliate them long enough, squelch their instincts and impulse for the STORY, which is what drew them to journalism in the first place, and they will revolt. They will but in their own way that cannot be dictated by outsiders.

Right now, they are looking around at their co-workers, sizing them up, seeing who’s got the guts to make the break. Someone will start and the daring spirit will catch fire and their colleagues will be emboldened and want a piece of that freedom (and the dignity that comes with being genuinely free, your own man, your own woman, with your singular contribution to make, even within the context of the team).

So, please, don’t take it away from them with your damning foregone conclusions before they’ve even had a chance to stir. They know we’re a country born of revolution finding itself again in a sort of revolutionary moment. Do you really think the members of this intelligent, curious, articulate profession are going to be content with sitting silently on the bench, sidelined while the biggest story, the place where the action is, the main story, and in some sense the Ur story, the only story really worth covering, unfolds without their input and insight?

I very much doubt it. If they did that, they’d be worse than slaves. They’d be fools.

Add to this the publication of peer-reviewed science journal articles including Bentham-Open.org’s “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe” and we may well find evil-doer’s in our own midst – not in Afghan caves – at the bottom of this rabbit hole. How did that thermitic material get there and who put it there?

The “journalist journalists” are then duly marginalized on their niche web-sites and books and magazines and so forth, while the more important “celebrity journalists” would be dominating the airwaves and the bandwidths… but the masters of the universe could turn around and say “You see? It’s out there!” even as only a miniscule part of the public were the least bit cognizant of it, because, of course, most of the larger outlets of the media were dominated with celebrity driven crap.

Sound familiar, perhaps?

Hence, the al-Libi suicide/homicide isn’t a more “important” story simply because corporate America simply doesn’t want it to be an important story; it demonstrates that corporate America and its media arm were not only complicit with “a case for war” based on “inadequate” evidence and support, or even “fabricated” evidence, but were quite actively complicit with a regime that relied on “evidence” deliberately secured through the use of Medieval torture methods to pry false “confessions”. Possibly worse still, it might embarrass a potentially huge no trading partner and source of profits, our new friend in Tripoli (sorry Pan Am 103 and Lockerbie families… business is business).

Sufficeth to say, it just would not be good for business if this sort of story were more… widely reported.