<snip>
For more than three decades, the U.S. news media has been living off – or living down, depending on your perspective – its Watergate-era reputation of helping to unseat a power-abusing President and exposing a raft of other political scandals.
But the U.S. media’s debacle over Iraq – failing to seriously question George W. Bush’s case for invasion and often acting as pro-war cheerleaders as the casualty lists lengthened – has dealt a death blow to that 30-year-old mythology. The bloody spectacle of Iraq has become the Waterloo of Washington’s “Watergate press corps,” its crushing defeat.
Even the nation’s preeminent news outlets, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, were sucked into the fiasco, shattering the trust that many Americans had placed in their “free press” as a vital check and balance on Executive power.
By contrast, many poorly funded Web sites did a much better job of standing up to the political pressures, showing skepticism and getting the story right.The third anniversary of Bush’s Iraq invasion stands as a marker, too, for the slide of the U.S. news media’s big-name talking heads into the status of laughingstock, even if they’re too vain to know that the derision’s about them.
<snip>
Link: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/031906.html
Tell it Robert, tell it!!!
:kick::nuke::kick:
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
