..stenographic treatment by journalists... is not available to everyone. Only those who wield power
within America’s political and financial systems are entitled to receive this treatment. For everyone else — those who are viewed as ordinary, marginalized, or scorned by America’s political establishment — the exact opposite rules apply: their statements are subjected to extreme levels of skepticism in those rare instances when they’re heard at all.
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Look at one illustrative example from yesterday. An AP photo accompanied the column I wrote yesterday on the murder of yet another Iranian scientist. The photograph showed the scientist, who was 32 years old at the time he died, posing with his young son. I had seen this photograph elsewhere and, knowing that Salon can use AP’s photos, requested that Salon editors use it as the art for my story. But look at the caption that AP wrote to accompany the photograph:
Extreme skepticism oozes from every pore of that photo caption. AP refuses to accept that this scientist was killed; they even refuse to accept that this is an actual photograph of the scientist in question and that the photograph shows him with his son. Instead, AP wants you to know that even these pedestrian assertions are nothing more than unverified “claims” from Iran’s state-controlled media and thus cannot and must not be assumed to be true.
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Stenographic treatment is a license extended only the most powerful. As Atrios put it yesterday: “It isn’t as if random crazy people on the street are granted ‘they said it so that’s good enough to print’ privileges by our elite newspapers. Powerful connected people are.” The most damaging sin of this stenographic model isn’t laziness — the failure to subject false statements to critical, investigative scrutiny — although that is part of it. The most damaging sin is that it’s propagandistic: it converts official assertions and claims from the most powerful into Truth, even when those assertions and claims are baseless or false. This stenographic model is the primary means by which media outlets turn themselves into eager spokespeople and servants for the most powerful factions: the very opposite of the function they claim, with increasing absurdity, to perform.
http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/?du
I am just a poor boy
Though my story's seldom told
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
from "The Boxer"