Scathing article on johnny-come-lately MSM re: Iraq war

[TexasThoughtCriminal]

Wow! I just read this Rolling Stone article from October of last year blasting the MSM right between the eyes. I don't think this has been posted on DU before, but it's still every bit as relevant now, and it expresses the opinion of many here on DU.

What's dangerous about what's going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.

It doesn't take much courage to book the Dixie Chicks when George Bush is sitting at thirty-nine percent in the polls and carrying 3,000 American bodies on his back every time he goes outside. It doesn't take much courage for MSNBC's Countdown to do a segment ripping the "Swift-Boating of Al Gore" in May 2006, or much gumption from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift to say that many people in the media "regret" the way Gore was attacked and ridiculed in 2000. We needed those people to act in the moment, not years later, when it's politically expedient. We needed TV news to reject "swift-boating" during the actual Swift Boat controversy, not two years later; we needed ABC and NBC to stand up to Clear Channel when that whole idiotic Dixie Chicks thing was happening, not years later; we needed the networks and the major dailies to actually cover the half-million-strong protests in Washington and New York before the war, instead of burying them in inside pages or describing the numbers as "thousands" or "at least 30,000," as many news outlets did at the time; and we needed David Letterman to have his war epiphany back when taking on Bill O'Reilly might actually have cost him real market share.

Full article

[Phredicles]

1. Way recommended.

[Holly_Hobby]

2. It seems to me

the media follows the polls. When the polls turn against the administration, the media follows. Ratings, ya know.

Great article. K&R

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

4. This is because broadcast journalism has been changed from a duty to a profit center

When Ray-Gun removed the Fairness Doctrine, he also reduced the public service burden that radio and television used to carry.

It was the public service duty of radio and TV stations to broadcast "hard" news, and they lost money doing it in order to keep their broadcasting licenses.

[Selatius]

5. Don't forget the deleterious effects of the Telecommunications Act of 1996

If it weren't for that, several media conglomerates today would not exist in the form they currently do...because they would've broken US anti-trust laws if they did. It probably did as much harm if not even more harm than deleting the Fairness Doctrine alone.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

6. It's bad, I agree, but the deregulation trend started with Ray-Gun

Deregulate everything, the market is a magical being that will make everything better...

That rhetoric was a big pack of lies designed to enrich his supporters, but it worked.

[KoKo]

3. Good Reminder for us....thanks!