The media’s Weimar moment

[Commentary] In June 1954 on national television, Joe Welch, the US Army’s chief counsel, exposed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s dubious morality with those two legendary questions: “Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Such was the novelty of television back then that having given Sen McCarthy an authoritative forum for his views, TV could now serve as the instrument of his destruction. We all know what followed. The media attained the highest point of its legitimacy and authority during the Vietnam War with the publication of the Pentagon Papers and then the unfolding of the Watergate scandal. That ascendancy ran parallel to the rapid discrediting of politics as a vocation. Journalists were heroes. Politicians were scoundrels.

Thirty years later, with the revelations of the media’s blindness to and sometimes complicity with the lies that led America into the Iraq War, journalists joined politicians in the space of detention into which public opinion puts those figures who betray the people’s trust. From that point on, America, once dubbed the oldest young country in the world by Gertrude Stein, began to experience the historical version of a senior moment. It began to undergo a Weimar moment.

[Lee Siegel is the author of five books and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. His forthcoming book, The Draw: A Memoir, will be published in April.]