Wake-Up Time - By Alterman & Tomasky

[La_Serpiente]

Wake-Up Time
Yes, Bush has bullied the national media. But are they really powerless? Only if they play along. Herewith, five suggestions for how the Fourth Estate can stop the charade.

Are our national media -- schoolyard silly during campaign 2000, by turns somnolent and sycophantic ever since -- starting to rouse themselves from their long torpor? It's still way too early to answer that question with a "yes," but if that's what the answer turns out to be, the first week of February may have marked a turning point.
In that week, the media started raising new questions about the justification for the Iraq War; broke an important story about the administration knowing last fall that the Medicare bill would cost $134 billion more than it let on to its employers (the public); broke another about a probe of alleged bribes at Dick Cheney's Halliburton; and finally, led by The Boston Globe's Walter Robinson, started to take a semi-meaningful look into George W. Bush's disputed National Guard record.

Don't start dancing to the music just yet, though. Bad habits die hard, and we've all come to expect too little genuine journalism and far too much of what might be called "journalism-related program activity." This is what we got back in 2000, when Al Gore was deemed a lying SOB for statements he made that were wholly accurate. (Gore did play a large role in creating the predecessor to the Internet, he did hold the hearings that "discovered" contamination at Love Canal, and his only mistake regarding that most crucial of "lies" about who inspired the characters in Erich Segal's Love Story was accurately recalling a decades-old mistaken story in The Tennessean.) Remember, he was running against a guy who couldn't remember a year of his military service or anything connected with a million-dollar bailout he received regarding a fishy stock sale during which he was privy to inside information about the same stock's likely collapse. But hardly anyone thought those questions worth examining.

That was campaign 2000: almost no investigation of Bush's past and aggressive misrepresentation in his favor when the stories finally did come up. Karl Rove couldn't have asked for anything more.

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[tom_paine]

1. Wow, beautifully written article!

Wow.

[izzie]

2. Usually their are some papers that like to live up to their name

Take the Ellsburg papers. Some times news men like to make names for them selfs and also believe why they are their. It does all go together. Lets hope some paper will hang in their and tell the truth. This group in DC seems to have their fingers into every thing. From News to NIH. I do not think it has ever been this bad. Is that guys name spelled right?