The Media’s Worst Nightmare

This is not so much my fervent wish than my best guess.

It will take a few years to play out as the case load will be heavy, a select stream of a star-studded cast of men and women who have already earned stars on the Establishment Politic’s Boulevard-of-Fame.

Out of sight, alongside them, will be a much larger group from deeper inside the catacombs of the bureaucracy, names as anonymous as Peter Strozk and Lisa Page once were, or names like Papadopolous or Halper, each now known because of a media leak of a confidential source. They will accept a variety of plea-offers in exchange for evidence, and will also face their day in court, only with less fanfare.

Dozens, perhaps even hundreds more, will resign or retire, some maybe with full benefits, depending on their  relative guilt and their contributions to the prosecution.

Still, tens of thousands more in the federal government already go to bed each night fearing that tomorrow their name might appear in a media report about one of their colleagues they just happened to bump into at an office picnic.

As for duration, these trials will be more like Nuremberg than anything seen in America in recent years, which held 12 trials over 3 years, against 185 defendants, convicting 147.  So they were not tried individually, even the most heinous of the criminals standing 18 abreast.

So don’t tell me an American government doesn’t know how to pull off such a mass shindig successfully.

What will not be the same in these trials coming to a criminal theatre near you is that one of the major conspirators to these crimes will not be in the dock, but be in the gallery covering the trials as it always has every major news event from the beginning.

The American media.

While Nuremberg put an entire ideology of hate on trial, it did so against defendants by name, one name at a time. This  is consistent with American sense of jurisprudence. The old German state media did not cover the Nuremberg trials. That media had burned up with the rest of the reich in 1945. But one of its principal publishers, a Jew-baiter named Jules Streicher, from a newspaper with an unpronounceable name in Bavaria, was one of the  original 11 who were convicted and executed in 1946.

This will not likely happen in America. At least no smoking gun has been uncovered linking any major editor or publisher with any of the crimes. (That could change if proof can be found linking media figures to the creation of a conspiracy to bring down a presidency rather than merely serving as a pass-thru for government conspirators.)

But generally, the American media will cover these trials the same way it has any campaign or presidency it hasn’t liked. They will compare these trials with Stalin’s Show Trials of the 30s.

Still, with or without a trial, our media’s Jules Streicher’s will not be there any longer.

Much will have change in their front offices. Many of the nameless and faceless executives in American will also resign or retire. A couple may even reach inside that locked drawer on the right of their desk, only having watched the current media in action, unless a royal family name in publishing were involved, I doubt any have the courage.

What the media will lose, quickly and finally, and for at least three “bureaucratic-generations” (60-75 years) will be access…

…for no government official in any office will give them the time of the day for several years..

For every surviving member; in the Departments of Justice, FBI, State, Defense, CIA, DIA, EPA, all of them, every member who outlives these trials and lives to see new members join their ranks will strip his sleeve and show his scars. Then shall those names of those who stood in the dock of justice be remembered, familiar in their mouths as household words. This story shall the good bureaucrat, the experienced and wise bureaucrat, teach the new bureaucrat, so from that day, until the ending of his career in the agency, that this one lesson shall always be remembered…

…”Never tell anyone in the media a goddamn thing!

(Yes, this last paragraph is straight from Shakespeare’s St Crispin’s Day speech by “Henry V”, only as warning, rather than a rallying cry.)

For if you do continue to talk to the media, they will sit in the gallery with note pads and make notes about your trial just as they noted and passed on the information that got the entire trial parade started.

Big loser? A partisan American media.

Big winners? Who else?

Everything that goes around, comes around.