One of the telltale signs of the waxy yellow buildup that's encrusted the MSM these past two-plus decades was when Ted Koppel
belittled a worthy man by intoning "you just don't get it."
They got mirrors where you come from, O wise and noble MSM?
Koppel's phrase comes to mind when one reads CBS White House Correspondent Mark Knoller's
flabbergasted response to a
recent program that says what should be obvious to any member or student of today's media.
To hear Bill Moyers tell it last evening on his PBS program
“Buying The War," the White House press corps was a willing participant in its own deception about the President’s case for war in Iraq.
He portrays us as easily-manipulated stooges on bended-knee to the President and his top aides.
Now, I’m the first to concede there are plenty of good reasons to criticize the White House Press. We’re an irascible and unlikable bunch. I’m one of us and I don’t like us very much. But the point made by Bill Moyers at the start of his program last night is just off base.
He was flabbergasted again by the ferocity of readers' response to his post, which is obliviousness to the third power.
At least he asked for further responses, including the questions he should have asked when it mattered, and they're coming by the bushel.
My response to him follows:
I was shocked by your response to Bill Moyers's "Buying the War," both in earnest and in the Claude Rains sense.
The toothlessness, nay obsequiousness, of the media in the run-up to the Iraq War affected me profoundly.
Years ago, I was a journalist. My heroes were those who reported unflinchingly on civil rights, Vietnam, and Watergate. To me, they were inspiring and sustaining examples of truth getting the best of power, the finest of American traditions.
That the MSM had grown Right-leaning and vapidly commercial since Reagan took office was obvious to anyone not drunk on Beltway-party cocktails. Still, few of us recognized how truly debased the Fourth Estate had become.
Simply put:
- The media's most important job is to help us understand how to participate in our democracy
- Because you didn't do your job, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of young Americans are dead. We're on track to waste $2 trillion (per a Harvard study) destabilizing the Middle East and making our country a pariah.
As Lynyrd Skynyrd once asked "Can't you smell that smell?" And as Laura Petrie once said, "If you don't care enough to know, I'm not going to tell you." Pick up a copy of Eric Boehlert's "Lapdogs." He'll tell you.
Like many Americans (remember those massive protests the MSM barely covered?), I could smell the Iraq War as a phony a mile away. I kept waiting for the media to drop a dime on the naked emperor and naked Secretary of State. It didn't happen.
On 2/5/03, the latter nude dude spoke at the UN, and the media got the story as wrong as a story has ever been gotten. See
http://dayofshame.blogspot.com, which commemorates that unholy holiday.
With the war pending, I kept sending these questions to a Republican friend:
1. In your opinion, what good evidence did Bush or Powell provide that Saddam has WMD?
2. How can one justify a pre-emptive war absent strong evidence of either a clear and present threat or a violation of UN sanctions?
3. If evidence doesn't matter, why did we urge the UN to resume the inspection regimes?
4. What justified our trumping the UN's inspection efforts (which, again, were resumed at our urging), at a substantial cost to us in international good will?
5. Why are we optimistic that regime change will be effective, given the tragic history of blowback and no U.S. good deed going unpunished in the Middle East?
He never answered them, as he finessed the debate with imagery of mushroom-cloud gunsmoke. Outside of Charles Hanley, the Knight Ridder guys, and very few others, no one in the media asked such questions. Certainly no one in the White House Press Corps did.
In the years since, as far as I know, Helen Thomas is the only person who has asked the biggest elephant-in-the-room question in American history. If you'll pardon my French, or in the parlance of the day, my "Freedom":
http://vastleft.blogspot.com/2006/11/wtfawii.html___
Hey, the liberal light is always on at the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. Please stop by and say "hi!"
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