Robert Kaplan has an insightful essay — The Media and Medievalism — on the role that journalists play when they recklessly and irresponsibly exercise their power in such a way to weaken the authority of our leaders. Kaplan, himself an acclaimed journalist, characterizes his peers as bright and ambitious people whose social and economic stature gives them the influence to undermine political authority and society itself. He is concerned that such journalists have  a great deal of political power — magnified by technology — without the accountability that often accompanies such power, so that "they are not held culpable for what they advocate."
 
Kaplan calls them a clerisy and, similar to the grand inquisitors of Medieval Europe, their demands for perfection (from others) can help destroy a society. Leaders must choose, and inevitably these choices have imperfect outcomes which the media feels it is entitled to expose and attack, consequences be damned. This can result in a paralysis of decision—making or in decisions which can actually lead to the deaths of innocent people. Furthermore, international media outlets like CNN and Reuters feel no responsibility to their nation—state or even their own civilization (contra Fox News) and pander to the Third World to boost their ratings and their status. Indeed, in their clerical self—image, they automatically embrace whomever they perceive to be the weak and the oppressed (the Palestinians, for example) regardless of the sources of their despair. Kaplan does an admirable service to his own profession in reporting on this transformation.

Kaplan notes that some of the embedded journalists in Iraq tended to identify with the soldiers and occasionally used terms like "we" and "our" during broadcasts. They were attacked by others in the media for "going native" with the troops. These soldiers soon came to realize that many in the media were not on their side and were not giving an accurate picture to Americans back in the states. These soldiers began to use the internet to write for web sites and to set up their own blogs to give us a different and  more honest version of events transpiring in Iraq.
 
One recalls the famous Super Bowl Apple commercial of the lone runner hurling a hammer to shatter the giant screen from which "big brother" spoke. Not too far a stretch to see soldiers and bloggers in the role of the rebel and the figure on the screen symbolic of Mainstream Media.
 
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Ed Lasky   1 12 05