Arianna Huffington in LATimes: "Sleeping With The Enemy" MSM Jump Into Bed With Another Propagandist

[Hissyspit]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-huffington24apr24,1,3333538.story?track=rss

Sleeping with the enemy
The mainstream news media jumps into bed with another propagandist.

By Arianna Huffington
April 24, 2008

Over the last seven years, the lunatic fringe in control of the Republican Party -- the people who believe in torture but don't believe in evolution -- have hijacked our democracy, aided and abetted by the news media. The heart of the problem is not the bias of Fox News or the blowhards on AM talk radio but a mainstream media that has completely internalized how the right frames all political debate. The right-wing message has become a part of the news media's DNA.

The latest confirmation came with this week's announcement that Tony Snow, formerly a host at Fox News and press secretary for the White House, where he earned high marks as a gifted purveyor of Bush/Cheney propaganda, would be joining CNN as a commentator. I guess Karl Rove was too busy with his Newsweek gig and Bill Kristol with his New York Times column. What's next, NPR signing up "Scooter" Libby and David Addington?

- snip -

Have they been so cowed by the Republicans' relentless branding of them as "liberal" that they feel compelled to sleep with the enemy? Make no mistake, Rove, Kristol and Snow are the enemies of honesty, truth, facts, reality and the public's right to know.

Rove's commitment to deception is legendary. His entire career as a GOP shot-caller was built on it. Kristol, Dan Quayle's chief of staff in the first Bush administration, is neoconservatism's crown prince. As editor of the Weekly Standard, he was a prime pusher of invading Iraq, and his claims about the war's progress have been discredited again and again. His reward: a column in Time magazine in 2006-07, and then this year a conservative slot on the Gray Lady's Op-Ed page. The New York Times might as well have given a weekly column to infamous fabricator Jayson Blair.

Now CNN, the self-anointed "most trusted name in news," has thrown its arms around Snow and handed him its international megaphone.

Are the cable network's execs suffering from collective amnesia? Do they not remember the extremely distant relationship Snow had with the truth during his time as President Bush's mouthpiece? Because, in the end, the crux of this problem isn't Snow. It's the people who hired him -- and Kristol and Rove -- and their reasons for doing so.

- snip -

And he never let little things like the facts get in the way of his mission. In September 2006, just days after a Senate report unequivocally concluded there had been no prewar relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi, Snow insisted that such a relationship did exist, continuing to falsely link the Iraqi dictator to 9/11 -- evidence be damned.

Misinformation accomplished.

The fanatical right has put a modern media twist on Vladimir Lenin: "Self-loathing liberals will hand us the microphone with which we will bludgeon them."

[democrank]

1. The decay of mainstream media....

one of the most serious overlooked stories of the last 10 years.

[speedoo]

2. K&R. Thanks for posting.