Your Media Freak Show


Tristero:

...something close to the entire worldview of the mainstream political/cultural press is alarmingly askew. While posing as objective, they make specious, empty-headed judgments about presidential candidates, then without telling us, "throw their support" behind one rather than another. And, when genuine judgment is absolutely necessary to ascertain the substance behind a source's assertions, the press is often AWOL.

It goes beyond the press having a conservative bias, although that is part of it. It is, in fact, a massive incapacity/refusal to do the actual job of reporting actual news. Sure, journalism has had few golden eras. But what we've seen in the past 20 plus years, and especially in the past 10, is breathtakingly awful journalism.

There are exceptions, of course, and we know who they are: Krugman, Hersh, the McClatchy reporters, and others. But, as Somerby constantly reminds us, these voices barely matter until it is too late. The press has the power to bamboozle its constituency, the American people. And they have, over and over again. It is extremely dangerous for a country half as powerful as the United States to have a media as dysfunctional as this one. It is downright terrifying to think of the damage they have done over the past eight years by elevating Bush to the status of a serious candidate and denigrating Gore, then Kerry.