How'd BushCo get away with Iraq fabrications? Look no further than MSM.

[marmar]

'Watchdogs,' 'Lapdogs' claim Bush beat media
Submitted by davidswanson on Sun, 2006-06-25 20:57. Media
By John Freeman, The Grand Rapids Press

Although the American people did not know it, the entire Washington press corps understood that President Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq from the moment he took office. In fact, in a pre-election interview with the Houston Chronicle, Bush admitted he wanted "to be known as a war president."

So it was odd that coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post and many other newspapers during the lead-up to the Iraq war portrayed the president as an agonized leader who was being goaded into battle with a brutal dictator who "intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction," as David Remnick wrote in 2003, "but also to use them."

The story of how the Bush administration cooked up this marketing canard has been told and retold, but a complete picture of how the mainstream media ate it up has finally hit bookshelves. In "Lapdogs," Salon journalist Eric Boehlert details the media context in which it happened, while veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas puts the nature of this rollover in light of history.

Thomas has been working in Washington since the 1940s, when reporters had to run to pay phones to file, so she is no naif when it comes to government spin. A finer term for this art, she says, is "managed news," the earliest (and most brutal) example of which was the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which made it illegal to print anything critical of the president or Congress.

The rest of the article is at: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/12360

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. In another thread, ditto that.....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=1504445&mesg_id=1504609

[Peace Patriot]

2. Part of Bush's success with lapdogs lay in the phrase "mainstream media,"

which people who oppose Bush and his filthy war, and all his fascist policies, insist on repeating time and again. Mainstream. Mainstream. Mainstream. Mainstream. Mainstream media. MSM.

The war profiteering corporate news monopolies are not mainstream ANYTHING. They DO NOT REPRESENT the mainstream of the American people. They've gone way, way over to the right, in some cases to the extreme right. Their own polls (and those of independent pollsters), on all the issues over the last several years, as well as on Bush approval/disapproval, show a persistent, large (60+% ) progressive, peace-loving, justice-loving, democracy-loving, anti-Bush majority in this country. Yet they persist in their strong veer to the right and in treating Bush and his junta with reverential obeisance.

Call them war profiteering corporate news monopolies. Call them the global corporate predator news. Call them just "corporate news monopolies." Call them jackasses. But STOP CALLING THEM THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA (MSM). I know it's any easy handle. But PLEASE give it up!

They are messing with your minds. Their job is to create the ILLUSION that Americans support Bush. Their job is, further, to make YOU feel isolated and alone, and to make you think that most OTHER Americans have gone nuts, and approve of Bush, and of this rightwing drivel on TV/radio talk shows, and of the propaganda news. It's not true. Most other Americans believe just as you do in peace, justice and good government, and are just as mystified as you are by what Bush & brethren are getting away with.

We've been robbed of proper representation--on our OWN airwaves, in the news and opinion, and in Congress and the White House. This Bush junta no more represents our interests than Stalin represented the interests of Russian people. And they were "elected" in the same way--with SECRET VOTE COUNTING BY THOSE IN POWER.

Why do you think that the corporate news monopolies are HIDING that fact from you--and have placed an "Iron Curtain" over news about who now OWNS our election machinery and HOW they are "counting" all the votes in the new, Tom Delay-engineered, electronic voting systems (with "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code and virtually no audit/recount controls)?

They are COLLUSIVE with that election theft machinery. On Nov. 2, 2004, they DOCTORED their exit polls (Kerry won) to force them to FIT the "results" of "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY vote tabulation controlled by two Bushite corporations, Diebold and ES&S. That's what they did. They put FALSE numbers on everybody's TV screens--thus depriving the American people of major evidence of election fraud.

Is that mainstream American? Illegal, secret, privately controlled VOTE COUNTING? No, it is not. Nor can anything else they say or do be called "mainstream." They are goddamned fascists IN LEAGUE with the Bush junta to ROB mainstream America and turn us into slave labor and cannon fodder for their corporate oil wars.

They have nothing but contempt for mainstream America. They loathe democracy. They are 5 billionaire CEOs controlling ALL news and opinion in this country! They tell their editors/producers what to print and what to broadcast. They tell their reporters what to write and what not to write. And if they don't tell them directly, they tell them indirectly, with bribes and punishments--and all their editors and reporters know it. They are a propaganda machine for the super-rich and the military/corporate welfare establishment that is BLEEDING the life out of our country.

They aren't even close to being a free press. The NYT, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the Wall Street Journal, A-P, Time magazine, Newsweek, and the alphabet soup of corporate TV news organizations, and the news/entertainment monopolies of which they are the subsidiaries, have NEVER been this far rightwing and this war mongering and this anti-democratic. Never. Never before in our history would the entire news establishment of the county have ignored "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY vote tabulation by corporations with very close ties to the Republican Party and the Republican President. Never would they have ignored the egregious violations of the law--of the Voting Rights Act of 1965--that occurred in Ohio on Nov. 2, 2004.

We are being MANIPULATED and brainwashed that this crapass so-called journalism is MAINSTREAM.

Ask any American whether they want their vote "counted" by partisan corporations under a veil of secrecy. You think you are going to get a "yes" from most people? Certainly not. My guess--at least 80% "no way!" 10% confusion. 10% nutcases who like having a lying, murderous, thieving, hypocrite emperor ruling over them.

That's why they don't TELL people. The Bushites have stolen our right to vote right out from under our noses, and the war profiteering corporate news monopolies have silently colluded with them--with the Democratic leadership either collusive or scared of that combined Bushite/corporate news monopoly power. They know what happens to real dissenters.

And none of this establishment is "mainstream" and none of it represents US, the American people (with some few courageous exceptions, like John Conyers and Barbara Boxer, and even they are careful what they say about the secret vote counting corporations).

The good news is that it is still possible to throw these Bushite election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor'! Now THAT'S mainstream American! How we do it is pressure on state/local election officials and legislators. The decisions about voting systems are still made at the state/local level, where ordinary people still have some influence. Paper ballots are STILL an option. TRANSPARENT, VERIFIABLE elections are still possible. Let's get on with this truly mainstream American project--by word of mouth and "committees of correspondence" (as it must be), in the present circumstance. We can do our own peaceful 'Boston Tea Parties' right down the street at our boards of election and county registrars offices. Challenge this corrupt culture of secrecy around elections. Demand answer! Demand TRANSPARENT vote counting!

And stop calling these colluders in theft, murder and lawlessness the "mainstream media"!