by Molly Ivors
Imagine, for a moment, that you are Maureen Dowd. You sit down twice a week and ruminate about feng shui or getting your chakras read or how hot you think Barack is and how that meanie old Hillary won't go away, or how Bill got oral sex this one time and wasn't it great because you got a Pulitzer for that!
It's a helluva living, you have to admit. All you had to do to stay on the gravy train was sneer at girly democrats and reminisce about your dad and do your level best to keep the status quo shallow, focused on image rather than policy. To be sure, there was a sense of forced outrage about it all, but you contributed to the kneecapping of an American president, the belittling of his would-be heir, and the elevation of the functionally retarded scion of a family with decades-long connections to genuine evil, a man who had done more to destroy America domestically, internationally, and globally than anyone could have imagined, but hey! it was all in good fun.
There were flashes on conscience in there, flashes which brought you a book contract, but some nights you knew, as you lay awake at 3am, that your relentless trivialization of the national conversation was directly responsible for the state you parodied in your book.
Still, you got paid for it, and well. If this isn't what Pinch wanted, you wouldn't be pulling down the big bucks, after all. You may even have convinced yourself, now and again, that you were providing some kind of public service.
And then tell me how you can possibly excuse yourself from culpability for a system in which actual reporting is outsourced to barely-English speakers. If you hadn't successfully ridden the wave of trivialization that demeaned real reporting, maybe people wouldn't think press releases and webcams were an acceptable substitute for feet on the ground. This didn't come out of nowhere, Maureen. Look in the mirror.
