Indymedia: Editors whose news outfits ran Bush propaganda should resign

[rainbow4321]

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/02/311118.shtml

When CBS goofed up, people were fired and quit in disgrace. But when dozens, maybe hundreds of news outfits run Bush administration-made propaganda posing as legitimate news reports, nobody has to resign. What gives here?

Okay, so we know now that the Bush administration has been using all kinds of devious means to push propaganda on the American public--fake news generated by the Pentagon for overseas, and ultimately, courtesy of blowback, U.S. consumption, fake news reports by fake reporters peddled to local TV stations, bought reporters and syndicated columnists paid to shill for the administration's policies, and even fake reporters salted into the White House press corps to ask puffball questions if the president or press secretary start getting too much heat.


It wouldn't be so bad if the American media weren't so sanctimonious about itself. Look at how the talking heads of journalism and the big names in news management and academia came down on CBS for its failure to fully check out those internal memos from Bush's AWOL National Guard days. We still don't know for certain that those documents were faked--they may well have been real--and moreover, there's good reason to believe that they were at worst just recreations of what actually had been written about the president's sorry-ass record of service in the Guard. And yet "60 Minutes," under withering criticism by the rest of the media for its failure to do due diligence, ended up firing or asking for the resignation of several senior staffers.

The real culprit in this massive propaganda scam, though, has to be the public, which seems to take little interest in actively evaluating the news it is being spoon-fed. Unlike the Soviet public, which had, and the Chinese public which has a completely cynical view of the media in those two nations, and which long ago learned how to weed out the occasional truth from between the lines of lies and misrepresentations, the American public is almost completely passive and gullible, accepting the garbage that passes for news each day as the gospel truth.

[MSgt213]

1. Sums of my feeling very well. Jason Blair? Are these examples any

different?

[forgethell]

2. kick n/t