Teardown: The Mainstream Media Turns on Bush
By Michael Collins
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0610/S00155.htmFor the very many long months since George W. Bush became the Republican nominee for the office of the President of the United States, so many of us have been shocked at how the national media was at every turn leveraged with the fulcrum of Fairness, as defined by the volume of objecting voices, into splitting the difference to always seek a "middle" between whatever was posited by the two parties. On the one hand, on the other hand; anything else was subject to accusations of "media bias".
Asking W if he's been drug-free for X many years? A game of Gotcha! And he caught you playing it!
Asking W if he actually showed the hell up for his princely National Guard "duties"? Gotcha! Documents that purport to give final proof of that are fake, so the story's an embarrassment to the damn Liberal Media!
What the hell was happening? How were our protectors, our free press, failing us so badly in their capacity to monitor not only what our "rulers" said, but the truth of what they said?
In retrospect, the marginalization and "outplacing" of non-believers of the neo-con agenda has been constant and effective, like termites, or rust. Access was denied to critical members of the media whose professions depended on having important stories; access was opened to those who not only believed but could serve (if you will) as force multipliers, embedded in the editorial decisions of papers of record. The same thing happened in the United States military, in the State Department, in the CIA, in the Justice Department. Everywhere they could insert a tentacle of political interest, and squeeze.
But all good things come to an end. Bad things, too.
All this by way of introducing the piece by Michael Collins on where the tide has turned with regards to the Fourth Estate. When he says:
However, anyone who is awake and paying attention can see that we’re headed for the cliff in a car driven by a juvenile leader who is cheered on by what appears to be the greatest collection of enablers in the history of governance.
...he isn't just repeating what many of us have long believed; he's describing what the so-called "Mainstream Media" has awakened to. Of course, there's no such thing as the "Mainstream Media"; just the mass media, controlled primarily by corporate interests. And those corporate interests are no longer being a firewall between W and his failures.
There's been a change, and we need to continue to be that change. Read this, and leave defeatism behind.