The media can't handle the truth

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Excellent opinion piece in Salon
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Media sheep facing truth-hungry Internet wolves

By Gene Lyons

Aug. 27, 2009 | So yet another Bush administration Cabinet-level official has petitioned to get his conscience and reputation back. This time, it's Tom Ridge, former secretary of Homeland Security. The one-time Pennsylvania governor admits in a new book that he felt political pressure from the White House to issue bogus terror alerts before the 2004 presidential election.

Big surprise, right? By 2004, anybody who didn't grasp that crying wolf was the Bush/Cheney administration's basic game plan was probably also astonished last January when the "Texas cowboy" who's never been seen on a horse chose a Dallas mansion over his beloved ranch. Golly, who's doing all that brush-cutting?

Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of the Ridge revelations has been a flame war that's broken out between establishment Washington pundits and less-reverent bloggers. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder started it by observing in smug inside-the-Beltway fashion that he and like-minded colleagues were actually right to be wrong about fake terror warnings.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/08/27/lyons/

[Hamlette]

1. Lyons is great, good summary of how horrid the media has become.

God I hate the village.

[JohnyCanuck]

2. kick n/t

[DaveT]

3. What drives me crazy

is that this has always been the case. If Lyons' quote from Upton Sinclair doesn't make it clear -- watch any of the movie versions of "The Front Page" for how journalism worked almost a century ago. Recall your history of the Spanish American War.

Yet year by year, progressives keep pulling their hair out in frustration over how the mainstream media serve the interests of the entrenched political order. Lyons' general point rarely strikes home, in my opinion -- internet blogging does not require the assistance of a heavily capitalized national distribution system. Getting information out to the entire world is relatively cheap and that is killing the newspaper, and thank God for that.

[bemildred]

4. Yeah, not new at all, but radio and then TV really upped the volume.

And, as you say, the internet has wrested control of the framing of debate away from the corporate tools for the first time.