Journalist Matt Taibbi had a hilarious and somewhat enlightening article published over at Znet recently. The article starts out quoting an attack against Michael Moore from Christopher Hitchens over at Slate.com. Hitchens writes: "To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental... Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of 'dissenting' bravery."

Taibbi fires back with: "Well, that's rich, isn't it? Christopher Hitchens crawling out of a bottle long enough to denounce Michael Moore as a coward. I can't imagine anything more uplifting, except maybe a zoo baboon humping the foot of a medical school cadaver."

The focus of Taibbi's article is an attack on journalists like himself who are spineless and weak when it comes to journalism. Stating the hypocrisy of Hitchens words, Taibbi writes, "All journalists are cowards. Hitchens knows it, I know it, everybody in this business knows it." He believes that the business is so full of cowards and sellouts that statements by Hitchens on the subject are ludicrous. "Such is the pretense of modern journalism, that we are to be lectured on courage by a man who has had his intellectual face lifted so many times, he can't close his eyes without opening his mouth."

Taibbi also feels that there is a myth circulating about the media that people need to understand. He states, "Everybody's got to make a living. But let's not leave people confused out there. The idea that anyone in today's media is either courageous or cowardly on the basis of what they write or broadcast is ridiculous." He believes Hitchens and others are mixing up the difference between honestly and courage. "What Hitchens calls courage is really a willingness to offend one's intellectual constituency, and what he really means by that is honesty-something very different from courage." Courage on the other hand is "a willingness to face real risks-your neck, or at the very least, your job."

In the journalism business no one sticks up for themselves or stands behind their work either. If they did, Taibbi thinks, they would refuse to sell out to companies who place profit and entertainment above reporting and information. "Steelworkers stick up for each other. Even camera operators and soundmen stick up for each other. But journalists just sit still in their cubicles with their eyebrows raised, waiting for it all to blow over, in those very rare instances when a colleague walks the plank."

The journalists who do stand behind their work are few and far between. This has made Taibbi a bit bitter it seems. "I've been around journalists my entire life, since I was a little kid, and I haven't met more than five in three-plus decades who wouldn't literally shit from shame before daring to say that their job had anything to do with truth or informing the public. Everyone in the commercial media, and that includes Hitchens, knows what his real job is: feeding the monkey. We are professional space-fillers, frivolously tossing content-pebbles in an ever-widening canyon of demand, cranking out one silly pack-mule after another for toothpaste and sneaker ads to ride on straight into the brains of the stupefied public."

The war is an issue which falls in line with Taibbi's concern. "Michael Moore may be an ass, and impossible to like as a public figure, and a little loose with the facts, and greedy, and a shameless panderer. But he wouldn't be necessary if even one percent of the rest of us had any balls at all. If even one reporter had stood up during a pre-Iraq Bush press conference last year and shouted, "Bullshit!" it might have made a difference. If even one network, instead of cheerily re-broadcasting Pentagon-generated aerial bomb footage, had risked its access to the government by saying to the Bush administration, "We're not covering the war unless we can shoot anything we want, without restrictions," that might have made a difference. It might have made this war look like what it is-pointless death and carnage that would have scared away every advertiser in the country-rather than a big fucking football game that you can sell Coke and Pepsi and Scott's Fertilizer to."

Taibbi wonders where the articles are about that kind of cowardice from those people. "Hitchens in his piece accuses Moore of errors by omission: How come he isn't writing about the CNN producers who every day show us gung-ho Army desert rats instead of legless malcontents in the early stages of a lifelong morphine addiction?" They just don't happen though in the mainstream media and this is why Taibbi calls all journalists cowards.