Behind these reasons lie even bigger ones. Conservative author David Frum wrote a moving essay for TheWeek.com calling Breitbart's actions a "shame." In a phone interview, Frum laments the extremists at both political poles who play dirty. "The institutions that used to enforce the rules are weaker than they used to be," he says, including "the unloved major media organizations and the value they placed on checking facts."
Once upon a time, Frum says, if a reporter brought an editor a juicy tape that obviously had been edited, "you would not immediately and uncritically put it on the air. For one thing, you had time, half a day, to check it." In addition, large media outlets were deep-pocketed targets for libel suits.
Despite our intense politics, central party structures are "weaker than they used to be," says Frum, "meaning that candidates, as long as they raise a lot of money, can do or say almost anything they please, and the party can't tell them to cool off, do their homework, work their way up the structure." The old brakes on excess, of language or of emotion, are off.
We're left in a strange place, Frum says, with an administration evidently worried about what happens on the Glenn Beck show.
"Every administration overlearns the lessons of the administration before," Frum says. "The Obama administration is afraid of having Donald Rumsfelds on its hands. So when this happens, they cry, 'Ax the woman, before the nighttime talk shows!' "
Contact staff writer John Timpane at 215-854-4406, jt@phillynews.com or www.twitter.com/jtimpane.
