Media Views

the basic and chronic failures to engage in independent journalism routinely elude serious examination, whether by the "public editor" at the New York Times or by the Washington Post's in-house media columnist, Howard Kurtz, who has long double dipped as a punch-pulling media critic on the CNN payroll. Such media institutions have no use for analyzing deep-seated patterns of war reporting. The belated and fuzzy outlines of the U.S. media's second thoughts are apt to appear long after the real-time coverage has aided and abetted Washington's war planners. So, today, with few murmurs of concern from the powerhouse U.S. media, the quality of reporting on the Iranian "threat" is scarcely more of a departure from the official White House line than what we were getting five years ago in countless stories about the menace of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.