The Media Refuses To Keep Government Honest

Posted by Jill Hussein C., Brilliant at Breakfast at 12:46 PM on April 23, 2008.

This morning I turned on the TV to Morning Joe and was immediately struck by how the show has turned from relentless Clinton-bashing to hammering what they call Barack Obama's 10-point drop in a national poll since last Wednesday's debate.

It's no secret that the media do what they can to manipulate political thought in this country. Whether it's talking heads referring to "The Democrat Party" or newsreaders on WINS referring to "The Democrat primary tomorrow in Pennsylvania", or Tim Russert perpetuating the "Barack Obama didn't put his hand over his heart for the Pledge of Allegiance" meme when the event portrayed in That Infamous Photograph was the playing of the National Anthem, at which such a gesture is not required; or the unabashedly positive coverage given to John McCain, it's not voters who decide our elections, it's the media.

Television in particular has been living off the legacy of Edward R. Murrow for the last fifty years, even though that legacy has now been tarnished beyond redemption by talking heads who are an integral part of Beltway society and care more about access and schmoozing than actually providing information to the American people. But newspapers have hardly been immune.

The reason it's been so infuriating to watch Hillary Clinton suck up to Richard Mellon Scaife for an endorsement and throw an organization that was founded to defend her husband from impeachment under the bus to curry favor with people who wouldn't vote for her in the fall anyway is because she is giving legitimacy to the very tactics that nearly destroyed Bill Clinton's presidency, and in doing so, giving legitimacy to the sorry state of the press during the Bush years. This one-two punch indicates a capitulation to the wreckage that is news coverage in this country that is unacceptable, especially after we find out the extent to which the Pentagon, through its deployment of retired military officers to the media to spread the Administration's line about the war in Iraq, has manipulated public opinion.

As devastating as this blockbuster story in the New York Times yesterday is, there's a certain "closing the barn door after the horse leaves" quality to it. Back when it counted, the Times allowed Judith Miller and others to parrot the Administration's line, giving the lies about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction a credibility they might otherwise have lacked.

Greg Mitchell reports on E&P's efforts to expose how the Times participated in the very propaganda campaign yesterday's article now decries.

Perhaps the gamble that the paper took in mortgaging its credibility to curry favor with a lying sack of dung of a president in the aftermath of a national trauma, and its continuing mortgaging of its credibility by paying William Kristol to write swill for its op-ed page, are two reasons why the paper posted a $335,000 loss in the first quarter of this year.

Was it worth it?

Tagged as: media, election

Jill blogs at Brilliant at Breakfast.