The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.
Ponder this. The 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation.
In a Manichean world (Bushworld / NeoChristoworld) a duality struggles - light versus darkness; good versus evil; you're either with us or against us.
If there is a liberal media, in a Manichean world, there must then be a 'conservative media.' We don't hear much about the 'conservative media" (it's known to liberals as the right-wing slime machine).
When the 'liberal media' doesn't live up to its reputation, then what in fact is the 'liberal media?' If it's not liberal, then it must be conservative.
The country would have been served (a word Scotty uses more than once) had the liberal media lived up to its reputation. What reputation? What was the SCLM expected to do?
"Liberal" is a weasel word Republicans use to frighten their children. Several years ago I volunteered to play bridge at the local duplicate club with some Junior High School Students. An unforgettable conversation ensued.
"Why are you playing bridge with us?" asked on of the two eighth graders.
"Because I think that children are God's great gift to human kind" (keeping the parts about devoted mongrels and tears to myself).
"Are you a liberal?" she continued, not pausing for air.
"Yes. Flaming," I replied.
I think the concern about liberal bias helps to explain the tendency of the Bush team to build walls against the media,” McClellan writes in a chapter in which he says he dealt “happily enough” with liberal reporters.
"Concern about liberal bias" helps to explain ... WHAT ... walls built against the media?
WHAT WALLS? Oh - the ones the Cheney Administration put up. Impenetrable from the outside, porous from within.
Because we KNOW Bush administration people LEAKED all kinds of propaganda to the press:
Mushroom clouds
Smoking guns
Weapons of mass destruction
Imminent threat
911 Saddam 911 Saddam 911 Saddam 911
Same bridge club, again, years ago. Betty, a regular player had clipped a WSJ editorial decrying to extreme bias of liberal professors at some large universities, focusing on English, Sociology, Philosophy, and History Departments, maybe Colleges of Journalism too. Not sure if these were public universities or private, or both.
How does WSJ get its data? The claim was that it checked the voter's registration records of the professors. I don't know. This information is available I suppose.
Betty let me keep the article, for study, to prove her point. She found the virtual non-representation of conservative professors at the university level disgraceful.
Okay. Got it now.
LIBERAL = REGISTERED DEMOCRATIC VOTER
Long haired, unwashed, hedonistic, hippy. Streets of Chicago, 1968. Spitters upon returning Vietnam war veterans. Oh, let's not overlook people of color, and licentious libertines unwed mothers. And unwashed union shirkers. And liberation theologists.
LIBERAL = those who hounded Richard Nixon from office and who WRONGLY believe that the President can break the law (exception: Clinton).
LIBERAL = those traitors who bound the tied the hands of the military behind its back and forced them to retreat from Vietnam, when victory was just around the bend; snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Who wouldn't let the GI's finish the mission. Who tried everything to keep even RAMBO from winning in Vietnam, which we know, for a fact, since we saw it in the movies.
So what kind of 'liberal media' can't live up to its reputation?
One that isn't liberal. One in lock step with the administration and its will to war. Cheerleaders. Propagandists. Literary whores upon whose finger tips type lightly on keyboards stained by the blood of 4,100 U.S. military personnel who have died in Iraq.
They too have been complicit in the wounding, the killing, and the displacement of millions of Iraqi's and Afghani's.
Always been this way. Nothing new under the sun. John Pilger tells this story:
"During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said their spokesman, “that we were astonished to find, after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were, by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don't have that. What's the secret? How do you do it?”
...
My experience is that what the Russian journalists were referring to is censorship by omission, the product of a parallel world of unspoken truth and public myths and lies: in other words, censorship by journalism, which today has become war by journalism.
For me, this is the most virulent and powerful form of censorship, fuelling an indoctrination that runs deep in western societies, deeper than many journalists themselves understand or will admit to. Its power is such that it can mean the difference between life and death for untold numbers of people in faraway countries, like Iraq.
During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group, Charter 77. One of them, the novelist Zdener Urbanek, told me, “We are more fortunate than you in the West, in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines of the media. unlike you, we know that that real truth is always subversive.” By subversive, he meant that truth comes from the ground up, almost never from the top down.
