I’m just catching up with an avalanche of reading, postponed because of concentration on my start-up and summer indolence.

Best of the bunch so far is Orville Schell’s explanation on Jay Rosen’s PressThink of why a group of journalism schools have banded together to rethink what they do.

Speaking as someone who has studied China and other Marxist-Leninist states for the last 45 years, there are haunting similarities between the public relations apparatus of the current administration and the propaganda apparatus of Leninist political parties. They include ultra-loyalty and obedience to the supreme leader; extreme party discipline; an absolute imperative to stay on-message (fidelity to “the correct lineâ€?); maximizing the use of state organs for propaganda purposes; and a poorly evolved appreciation of the essential role that the Founding Fathers of this country imagined for the press as an independent watchdog over all kinds of power (whether state, ecclesiastical, corporate, etc.)

I am not saying that there is a comparison between our government and that of a Leninist state like China, but I am saying that the role and acceptance by our state of the media as a legitimate and necessary institution is weaker now than ever before. I am also suggesting that because of their commercial/corporate backgrounds, when it comes to the question of “communications,â€? many in the higher reaches of government have a keener appreciation of public relations than of independent, hard-hitting and often abrasive investigative journalism. Their tendency is to want to use communications as “the mouthpieceâ€? of the state and party, rather than to see the most important role for communications as one of opposition and challenge to established power centers.

This almost religious veneration of Woodward, Bernstein, Bradley, Graham means that people did, and still do, feel a deep need to believe that someone can, and will, stand up to these prevailing centers of power and propaganda. The Watergate hearings were cathartic, because sclerotic Washington did finally rise for one grand moment to dig in the Washington manure pile and get past the spin and PR to search out truth and fact from falsehood. And, yes, by now we have forgotten many of those other figures like Sen. Sam Ervin or Sam Dash who played such important parts in the saga. What we remember instead is their personifications.