Asking his readers to "remember" that, on NBC, Chuck Todd "is billed as a reporter covering the White House, not a pundit expressing opinions," Salon's Glenn Greenwald (7/15/09, ad-viewing required) examines a Todd appearance on the MSNBC show Morning Joe "discussing reports that [U.S. Attorney General] Eric Holder is likely to appoint a prosecutor to investigate Bush torture crimes. Needless to say, everyone agreed without question that investigations were a ridiculous distraction from what really matters and would be terribly unfair": In response to virtually every media criticism (at least the few they acknowledge), establishment journalists will insist that their [...]
Jul
12
2009
MSM Still Ignoring Bank Bailout Alternatives
A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (7/9/09) has posted a reminder that "back in March Phillip Swagel, who'd been assistant treasury secretary under Hank Paulson, wrote a long article about the TARP bailout called 'The Financial Crisis: An Inside View.'" Thinking that maybe "it would be news if Swagel had stated that Paulson, Bernanke and Bush's attempts to foment panic to pass the bailout have 'surely' contributed to the current recession," Schwarz lays out some quotes showing that actually "he did": "The way in which the TARP was proposed and eventually enacted surely must have contributed to the lockup in [...]
Jul
06
2009
Iraq: 'Supreme' War Crime, or Simply 'Unnecessary'?
By 5 Comments
As Barack Obama and his pliant media pundits are "talking up the achievements of the six-year occupation," Consortium News' Robert Parry (7/1/09) is writing of the "public celebrations by Iraqis marking the American pullout from Iraq's cities." Parry's look back the last six years' reality clearly recalls how, "relying on false intelligence and laughable legal theories, Bush justified launching what the New York Times may call an 'unnecessary war' but what was in reality a 'war of aggression'"–constituting, Parry reminds us, "what the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II deemed 'the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes [...]
Jun
27
2009
The WaPo's Last Flash of 'Accountability Journalism'?
In Dan Froomkin's last column for the Washington Post (6/26/09), he promises to "continue doing accountability journalism"–as good as any self-description to distinguish his work from his typical Post colleague's obsequiousness–and tries "hard to summarize the past five-and-a-half years" in which "George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes": In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve…. How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily [...]
May
30
2009
NYT Likes Its Readers Complacent
Looking at "people of a certain age" for whom "getting a letter published in the Times has always been a very, very big deal," David Margolick (Nation , 5/27/09) tells the tale of two lifelong friends and constant New York Times letter submitters–one with a "Babe Ruth"-like record of getting his views into print, and the other, who was always "striking out." Want to know "what explained their very different fates?" Margolick tells us, "it wasn't politics": [George] Avakian couldn't contain his anger, and as anyone who reads the Times well knows, on the letters page no one ever gets [...]
Apr
26
2009
Bush Lie Lives On as Pro-Torture Spin Point
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David Swanson has noted (Consortium News, 4/23/09) that, as "much of elite U.S. punditry is backing away from torture," the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby is bucking that trend with an April 22 column in which "he both opposes torture under all circumstances and excuses it given the current circumstances." Jacoby's main justification for U.S. torture tactics are "the successes with which they have been credited"–such as "the foiling of Al-Qaeda's planned 'Second Wave'–a 9/11-like plot to crash a hijacked airliner into a Los Angeles skyscraper." Swanson gives the lie to this zombie resurrected from the graveyard of Bush administration propaganda: [...]
Apr
22
2009
Glimpsing Journalism's 'Devouring Black Hole of Corruption'
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A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (4/18/09) samples the response to Mike Allen of Politico's quote of "a former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush" calling the publishing of U.S. torture memos "damaging because these are techniques that work": This, from Andrew Sullivan, is a representative example of the reaction: Allen is allowing a member of the administration that broke the Geneva Conventions and committed war crimes to attack the current president and claim, without any substantiation, that the torture worked. He then allows that "top official" to proclaim things that are at the very least [...]
