The Absurd Report

Why does the MSM hate President Bush, and why do they seem to be doing everything in their power to sink him? The stock answer is “ideological bias”, but it occurred to me that there’s another, deeper reason. They view him as a threat to their very existence — and they’re right to do so.

The MSM sees itself as “the fourth estate”. They have the conceit that the press is a coequal branch of government with the legislative, judicial, and executive branches. The MSM sees itself as being the representative of the people in Washington, a watchdog to keep an eye on the government. And it demands that members of the three estates treat it as a coequal.

Bush has largely refused to do so. He has publicly stated that he doesn’t see the press as being a representative of the voters. He has held fewer press conferences than any other president in recent memory, and has actively worked around the press or outright ignored them.

This represents an existential threat to the MSM, because in fact they are not a constitutional coequal branch of the government. The only reason they were able to act in such a capacity in the past was because members of the legislative and executive branches were convinced to treat them that way. It’s kind of like the British unwritten constitutional system, except that it isn’t judicially enforced. It’s also fragile since the MSM’s position as the “fourth estate” is based mostly on tradition and habit.

Bush has broken with the tradition, and it represented a threat to the MSM to create a new tradition in which the MSM’s position is substantially downgraded.

So I think that part of the MSM’s reaction to Bush has been, “Ignore us, will you? OK, we’ll raise such a stink that you’ll be forced to pay attention to us. We have real power, you know.”

In other words, what we’ve been viewing is a power struggle between the president and the MSM.
Interestingly, there’s every reason to believe that the MSM is losing it. In their ongoing attempts to try to cause as much trouble for Bush as they possibly can, they’ve been degrading their own reputation steadily. The press’s reputation has been fading for decades anyway, but in the last five years it’s taken a nose dive. Their ongoing attempts to force Bush to give them obeisance is a significant part of the reason why.

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