Lapdogs

I've finished Boehlert's book and I highly recommend it. Like Tom Tomorrow says, for those of us who have been obsessively following this stuff for a few years the book won't be a big surprise, but it does an excellent job bringing it all together. One thing Boehlert doesn't manage to do, however, is explain why things are the way they are. Some of the explanation is 9/11, but that doesn't explain why the press pretty much slept through the Bush presidency until that day. The traditional-for-Republicans 100 day "honeymoon" lasted right until September 11.

Colbert's best line might have been:

I was vying for the job. I think I would have made a fabulous press secretary. I have nothing but contempt for these people.

Why does the press continue to internalize every right wing critique of them, all of which come from people who "have nothing but contempt for these people." Why did Bernie Goldberg get such a wide airing for his idiotic book? Why does CNN hire Bill Bennett who thinks journalists who report on the illegal activities of the federal government should be put in jail? Why are people like Hugh Hewitt and Assrocket, who simply believe that the news media should be entirely in service of a radical conservative agenda, regularly given a platform? Why is it in the "liberal media" there are so few liberal voices ever given an opportunity to speak? How was it that the New York Times, which spent years covering a land deal in which the Clintons lost money, decided to "discourage pieces that were at odds with the administration's position on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction and the alleged links of Al Qaeda"?

I don't have the answer to this basic question. I wish I did.