"Viva Nihilism! It must be great working in the Bush White House. Zero accountability. It's All Spin, All the Time. Nothing matters but politics, hence no unfounded claim requires correction or apology." - Russ Baker / All Spin All The Time
Tresy writes: "News organizations are in the credibility business. This works against us when the CW is completely at loggerheads with reality, and no one is willing to break with the pack, but at this point, for CNN to proffer lame excuses that the Administration itself isn't peddling, seems positively suicidal. What can the Moron-American FOX News demographic offer that's worth this kind of self-degradation?"
Alas. Old times there are not forgotten. Given this Bush administration's fondness for flannel underwear, euphemistically speaking, and the art of "terminological inexactitude" and "selective fact" management, I offer briefly, the following distant reminders of bygone swindles.
In a 1984 Rolling Stone magazine article titled "Terms of Endearment; how the news media became all the president's men", by William Greider (RS National Editor at the time), --- Greider offered the following observation concerning the Reagan/Bush administration's "cynical" approach to public policy debate.
The administration's cynical manipulation of the medium [television] was described, perhaps inadvertently, by George Bush's press secretary, Pete Teeley. "You can say anything you want during a debate and 80 million people hear it," Teely said. And if the daily newspapers point out glaring inaccuracies? "So what? Maybe 200 people read it, or 2000, or 20,000."
Greider continues:
The press fell under the spell of the video image. [...] The newspapers, with a few honorable exceptions, forfeited the one game at which they will always be better than television: tough-minded examination of the facts. [...] Why examine the actual record of the Reagan administration, the real inequities and unfair rewards, if everyone is swept away by this fervent "new patriotism"?
Seventy six years ago H.L. Mencken offered the following commentary with respect to the news media's listless critique of the Coolidge administration. Excerpts follow. Welcome back to 1927.
"The decay of the Coolidge superstition leaves most of the principal newspapers of the United States looking very sick. Since the very moment of the martyr Harding's dispatch by the Jesuits they have pumped up his absurd little successor in a lavish and voluptuous manner. Their proprietors, and, in many cases, their managing editors and chief editorial writers, have sailed down the Potomac on the Mayflower, listening to him snore; their news columns have been filled with imbecilities in favor of him, and their editorial pages have glittered with his praises. With what net result? With the net result that even the Babbitts of the land have begun to see that he is a hollow and preposterous fellow, without anything in his head properly describable as ideas, and with notions of dignity and honor indistinguishable from those of a country book agent. He has squirmed and he has backed water; he has played cheap and dirty politics; he has favored charlatans and used the immense influence of his office against honest men. There has been no more trivial and trashy President in American history, nor one surrounded by worse frauds."
[...]
"With precious few exceptions, they [the newspapers] have continued to anoint and flatter him, even when the news they had to print made the truth about him plain to the dullest. He has had, from the first, a superb press - docile, humorless, slimy and knavish. It has, in dealing with him, disgraced itself beyond pardon or remedy. Coming at last - and how gingerly! - to a more realistic attitude towards him, it only reveals the depths of its degradation heretofore."
[...]
"Washington maintains a colossal machine for converting ambitious young journalists into dependable press agents. That machine has wheels in the Capitol and in all the departments of state; its prime mover is in the White House. The problem of resisting its operations is a technical one, and managing editors with any genuine gift for their art and mystery ought to be able to solve it. A few, as I have said, have done so, and to brilliant effect. [Mencken credits the Nation and the New Republic as exceptions to the deterioration of quality journalism.] But the average American managing editor is too incompetent professionally to deal with such difficulties. He prints balderdash because he doesn't know how to get anything better - perhaps, in many cases, because he doesn't know that anything better exists. Drenched with propaganda at home, he is quite content to take more propaganda from Washington. It is not that he is dishonest, but that he is stupid - and, being stupid, a coward. The resourcefulness, enterprise and bellicosity that his job demands are simply not in him. He doesn't wear himself out trying to get the news, as romance has it; he slides supinely into the estate and dignity of a golf-player. American journalism suffers from too many golf-players. They swarm in the Washington Press Gallery. They, and not their bosses, are responsible for the imbecilities that now afflict their trade." - HL Mencken / editorial,The American Mercury, March 1927, Vol. X - No. 39 / page 281.
Sounds familiar doesn't it. Flannel, euphemistically speaking, never goes out of style.
More insight on the matter here: Welcome back to the good old days of the 21st century. The Press Gives Bush A Free Ride On His Lies, by Robert Kuttner
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