Rise of the Mammals

Via Atrios comes this stirring column by Gene Lyons about the demise of the media pundit dinosaurs. Regarding Steve Colbert's recent roasting of the President:

Satire comes in many forms. I doubt that Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” evoked belly laughs among Ireland’s 18 th century English occupiers when it recommended remedying poverty by roasting peasants’ infants like suckling pigs.

George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” had few fans in the Politburo when it mocked communism’s pretense of universal brotherhood: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Written in 1943, Orwell’s fable wasn’t published until August 1945, when World War II ended, making Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill no longer allies.

This president loves dishing it out. The Associated Press reporter who introduced Colbert told an anecdote about Bush teasing him at a press conference for having “a face for radio.” Ha, ha, ha. Good one, Mr. President. He is awfully homely. Colbert’s performance, however, made it clear that Bush doesn’t enjoy taking it.

Well, tough. Millions of Americans haven’t enjoyed being subjected to Bush’s swaggeringly contemptuous disregard for the truth. Nor, to come to the point, the posturing of media enablers like Cohen, a liberal columnist who wrote in 2000 that the nation was “in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse.... That man is George W. Bush.”

The larger point is that Beltway courtiers like Cohen, Time’s Joe Klein and others currently succumbing to the vapors over critical e-mails from fans thrilled by Colbert’s gutsy performance are on their way out. The brief reign of the celebrity pundit began with cable TV and appears to be ending with the Internet. Washington socialites are quickly being replaced in public esteem by politically oriented bloggers like Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, the inimitable Digby, Glenn Greenwald, Billmon, Atrios and many others. As Greg Sargent recently pointed out in The American Prospect, “Readers are choosing between the words on a screen offered by Klein and other commentators and the words on a screen offered by bloggers on the basis of one thing alone: The quality of the work.” Sure, there’s a danger of groupthink. That’s true of all mass media. But there’s also a fierce independence and an intellectual honesty among the best online commentators that are making Washington courtiers awfully nervous.