Bernanke and Pelley and the Wimpering Death of the 4th Estate

The 60 Minutes interview of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke (12/5/10) was dispiriting for many reasons. I came away convinced that our Banker -in-Chief was channeling Titanic Captain E.J Smith as he steadfastly and unwittingly steamed toward his doom. Of course the Captain Smiths of the world never go down alone. But my biggest disappointment was not with Bernanke. He is another in a long line of "public service" apparatchiks who is finally discovering, to our detriment, that academic principals don't seamlessly translate into the real world. My main concern is with American journalism in general and Pelley and 60 Minutes specifically. Bernanke, even at the start of the interview, was sweating! His lips were trembling and his voice was quavering as he dissembled in response to Pelley's litany of softball questions. He (Bernanke) was more composed when he was being grilled by Congress. I don't have any formal training in reading body language but it appeared that BB was either experiencing a series of petit mal seizures or he was unnaturally concerned that Pelley was going to ask him something for which he had no acceptable answer. Not to worry though. This is not the 60 Minutes of Mike Wallace. Leslie Stahl will push the Facebook Kid in an interview that has only fleeting cultural significance, while multiple Murrow winner Pelley carefully wraps our sweaty Fed Chairman in verbal cotton candy while covering The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. The sad truth is that the 4th Estate in this country has prostrated itself and exposed it's hind quarters to the government and their corporate/banking masters. I'm not certain when this started but I'm convinced that if the American journalists of the 1970s were as prone to the vapors as their modern counterparts we would never have heard about Watergate. The Founding Fathers created an ingenious and durable, although not perfect, system. The job of the 4th Estate in this system, with the benefit of freedom of the press, was to keep the politicians honest. Or as honest as they could. They've failed miserably for the last many years. As happens with all complex systems which suffer catastrophic failures of major components, the pressure builds until it must find a method or vehicle of release. In the 1950s and 1960s behind the Iron Curtain it was called Radio Free Europe. In 2010 America it's called WikiLeaks. An organization like WikiLeaks would serve no purpose in a society where investigative journalism thrived. Mr. Pelley,you can play a small role in the revitalization of your craft. The next time you're interviewing someone who looks like he's about to soil himself, find out what's he's so nervous about.