Media Derangement Disorder.

It's such a sickness.

THE FOLKS AT CNN'S "RELIABLE SOURCES" just emailed me this excerpt from today's show transcript with UPI reporter Pamela Hess:

PAM HESS: It's so much easier for us to cover this as a political horse race. It's on the cover of "The New York Times" today, what this means for the '08 election. But we're not asking the central national security question, because it seems that if as a reporter you do ask the national security question, all of a sudden you're carrying Bush's water. There are national security questions at stake, and we're ignoring them and the country is getting screwed.

Better that the story should be missed, and the country screwed, than that a reporter might look unacceptably friendly to Bush!

So UPI doesn't cover a story to the satisfaction of a single reporter, therefore, the country is getting "screwed." And this screwing will render the surge ineffective so we'll lose the war.

Nice.

The real derangement part of MDD is to hold two mutually-exclusive beliefs: (1) that "old media" are increasingly irrelevant, outdated, out of touch and ignored and (2) they can move space and time.

There is sadly no cure for MDD.

UPDATES:

Kevin Drum is "genuinely stumped" by this (he must not be familiar with MDD) and adds,

It's true that there hasn't been a lot of conversation about what we should do when the surge fails, but it's laughable to suggest that this is because doing so would be seen as taking George Bush's side. It's mostly because people don't want to be tarred as defeatists by people like Pam Hess and Glenn Reynolds.

But conservative John Cole is even more shrill and unserious.

It isn’t that the right hates the media. They just hate the media when they aren’t saying exactly what they want them to say. The insinuation that people are not looking at the long-term outcomes of the policies in Iraq (except for the noble stay the course crowd) is not only stupid, it is offensive.

Pam Hess isn’t bravely uncovering a hidden secret about the way the media operates, she is doing little more than helping to prep the “Stab-in-the-back” crowd as soon as the Iraq disaster finally ends.

Ouch.