The Mainstream Media Needs Psychotherapy

The first (maybe the only) thing I learned in twenty or so years of psychotherapy (hey, I wrote for Woody Allen) was one of the major psychological problems many of us have is we always want to be “right.” Indeed, this need to be right can cloud our thinking to such extraordinary degrees we will cling to a view even when the results are wildly detrimental to ourselves.

The Mainstream Media are particularly good case in point for this. They continue to ask asinine self-destructive questions, as they did today to John Howard and Tony Blair, even as media popularity plummets to the lowest (or near lowest) levels ever. These MSMers desperately want their view to be correct about Iraq and the war on terror at the very moment their fellow citizens are being attacked on all sides, sort of like the people who wanted to reason with the guards as they were gassed at Auschwitz just to prove… to themselves at least… they had the right opinion five years before… or maybe ten.

Of course the “need to be right” often leads to blatant lying as we have seen recently from Reuters and the Associated Press. Of course this kind of prevarication is a huge threat to democracy, greater I am convinced than even Bin Laden and his religious fascist cohorts.

Less than half a year ago when some of us first started talking about Pajamas Media we saw it merely as a gadfly/competitor to the Mainstream Media. Since then, the situation has gotten more serious. Who knows where all this will lead?