There was a man from Texas who apparently gave a speech in Washington yesterday in which he said absolutely nothing new but all the papers covered it as if it were something. One major story that didn’t make it onto the front page, though, the kind of story that should be front and center all the time and if it were could change our relationship to politics and our own governance, was the story of the filibuster held in the senate yesterday to prevent passage of a terrible anti-Constitutional dirty tricks surveillance act. It’s just the latest step in the dance of politics and journalism in the late mass-media era. The music goes up: lights, cameras, pundits and a fabulous Congressional Hill show draw the press to cover a meaningless speech because “news consumers want a spectacle” and because American news consumers “won’t tolerate nuts and bolts coverage of dusty procedural lawmaking” and so on. But this filibuster story is not dusty at all. It’s a web of intrigue! Whatever. Then we get delivered non-news about the meaningless speech by the man from Texas. Meantime, the business of lawmaking goes on without scrutiny. So congressman and woman play games and sign away our rights and lobbyists have their way. The result is that suddenly laws are on the books that facilitate all kinds of shenanigans and there’s not much we can do about it. Twenty years later scholars would write about how we all got fooled again and then we’d all grow more cynical and would be castigated by the press for “tuning out.”

Good riddance 20th-century-style mass-media news. Now there’s Glen Greenwald and the internet! Let the old media write for each other their bad stories about nothing. We’ve got the web to inform us!

Note: Greenwald does this Greenwald thing much better than I do. Go to the source!