Media Matters: Media picks up where they left off 8 years ago...

[GreenTea]

It's going get much worse, the media will blowup and exaggerate stories lines about every tiny little thing concerning Obama, (even if it doesn't have anything to do with Obama).... they'll still try to connect anything and everything to Democratic President Obama, hopefully throw him off balance, to weaken him and his agenda, to trying to derail his presidency and especially his social agenda as much as possible....

These are the same republican pigs we all know so very well...

If all else fails the republican mainstream media machine will make up stories, outright lie, keeping bullshit stories alive and on the air for as long as possible...make-believe there is all this controversy and suspect about Obama's and his personal character...This same media vastly weaken Democratic President Clinton and his agenda this same way....And as we can clearly see it's never too early for the republicans to start.

http://mediamatters.org/

Media Matters: Media pick up where they left off 8 years ago.

A media blog featuring news links and progressive media criticism from around the web, along with commentary from Eric Boehlert and Jamison Foser.

To anyone who lived through the media feeding frenzy of the 1990s, during which the nation's leading news organizations spent the better part of a decade destroying their own credibility by relentlessly hyping a series of non-scandals, the past few days, in which the media have tried to shoehorn Barack Obama into the Rod Blagojevich scandal, have been sickeningly familiar.

Whenever reporters think -- or want you to think -- they've uncovered a presidential scandal, they waste little time in comparing it to previous controversies. Yesterday, CNN's Rick Sanchez tried desperately to get the phrase "Blagogate" to stick -- the latest in a long and overwhelmingly annoying post-Watergate pattern of ham-handed efforts to hype a scandal by appending the suffix "-gate" to the end of a word.

Sanchez's efforts to create a catchphrase aside, the criminal complaint filed against Blagojevich this week isn't the Watergate of the 21st century -- though it shows signs that it may become this decade's Whitewater.

Right about now, you may be scratching your head, trying to remember what, exactly, the Whitewater scandal was. Didn't it have something to do with a bank? Or a land deal? But didn't the Clintons lose money? How did the congressman who shot the pumpkin fit in?

But Whitewater is quite simple, when it is understood as it should be -- as a media scandal, not a presidential scandal.

As an endless series of investigations, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, revealed, the Clintons broke no law and violated no ethics regulations in connection with Whitewater. They lost money on a failed land deal in which their business partner cheated them. That's all there was. Republicans Ken Starr, Robert Fiske, Robert Ray, Al D'Amato, and Jim Leach, among others, investigated the matter, and none of them found illegality. There was simply nothing there -- except year after year of obsessive, and often dishonest, media coverage, fueled by conservatives who would stop at nothing to destroy the president.

As Joe Conason explains today, "The madness that was eventually classified under the quasi-clinical rubric of 'Whitewater' began, in no small degree, with the dubious idea that Arkansas, the Clintons' home state, was a peculiarly corrupt place -- and that any politician from Arkansas by definition was suspect (but only if he or she happened to be a Democrat)."

{Much more)
http://mediamatters.org/items/200812120015?f=h_top

Support Media Matters! - http://mediamatters.org/

Edit: Spelling

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Media Matters is a great resource.

[snot]

2. WHY do Dem leaders ignore the need for media reform?

No good answers.

[SharonAnn]

3. Remember July And August 2001, before 9/11? All Chandra, all the time.

Because there was a Democrat, Gary Condit, who could be "accused", suspected, analyzed, observed, etc. I gave up watching CNN then when they had day after day of Larry King and Nancy Grace "analyzing" whether or not Condit was guilty.

It was totally disgusting.

Making something out of nothing.

[Prophet 451]

4. Been expecting it

It's going to be Clinton all over again. The Rethugs, and their enablers in the corporate media, are going to pimp the hell out of every rumour, accusation and exageration, use those to create an endless fishing expedition and hostile investigations until they find the tiniest bit of dirt and then impeach him over it.

In his autobiography, David Brock laid out the mindset very well. As far as the Rethug power brokers were concerned, the public had no right to vote a Democrat in and they were determined to bring him down by any means necessary. Brock would push the bullshit in The American Spectator, the interconnected media circus would vault it into the semi-respectable news (i.e. the WSJ's op-ed page) and then the legit media would feel compelled to look into it. Brock published the "Troopergate" story, Paula Jones came forward and sued and the Rethugs used that to create Starr's endless hostile investigation. In the end, the only things Starr could prove were a couple of minor irregularities (of the kind caused simply by the size of the beurocracy) and Lewinsky. They figured Lewinsky had the best chance of sticking so they impeached him over that. If you're haven't read Brock's book ("Blinded By The Right"), do so. Brock eventually woke up and wrote his autobio which is pretty much a tell-all about being inside the witchhunt of Clinton.

And they're going to do it all over again with Obama. They'll use the rumours to set up an endless investigation and then impeach him on the tiniest bit of dirt they can find.