There was a time in our history when America's so-called mainstream media kept us informed on important issues and events. We have to look no farther than the recent past, a little more than thirty years ago, to give them a few well-deserved kudos. I refer specifically to the Pentagon Papers and Nixon's Waterloo that came to be known as Watergate. Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers was a global as well as national turning point in the Vietnam War. The investigative work of the Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward began the unraveling of Nixon's White House. Both events transpired in the early 1970's and ended with President Nixon's resignation from office on August 9, 1974. Both of these watershed moments in our history could not have happened in this decade, I would bet my last devalued dollar on that.
This morning, as I perused my emails, I focused on Salon's Glen Greenwald's piece entitled; The US establishment media in a nutshell. Glen has his panties in a wad about how little our MSM gives us on the Iraq War and how much baloney it does manage to slop we the hogs, with. With a simple NEXUS inquiry based on a 30 day news cycle, Mr. Greenwald provides us with the following big ticket items:
"Yoo and torture" - 102
"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16
"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043
"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607
"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079
Now, I am sure you notice right off that the most written about subjects are the worthless and totally inane Presidential campaign fluff bs. Topics which do not have a tinkers damn thing to do with the programs and ideas that either of the Democratic nominees for that office are espousing.
This set my jaw in a very uncomfortable position so early in the AM. To be more precise, it jacked the hell right out of my jaw, and I hadn't even had a friggin cup of coffee yet. Although most of the lesser articles are regarding events and issues in the Iraq War, nothing even has those two words in it.
What this tell us is that the MSM has “taken a powder” on reporting any of the events of the Iraq War within the last thirty days. Our media has expended little ink on addressing the events that have been unfolding in Basra or the daily shelling of the American compound in the Green Zone—two things which are important events with regard to how the war is going for BushCo.
If you want to stay abreast of the happenings in Iraq, you have to read either the European media or alternative media here in the United States. That is complete and utter bat guano my dear reader.
Unless of course your just regular folks, as Greenwald notes in his article. Regular folks, according to the MSM just want the fluff, the happy news. I find this unbelievable until I pause and consider how little the majority of American's have invested in the Iraq Occupation. Our money is invested heavily of course, but it isn't like we have to shell it out of our own pockets daily. Perhaps if we did that, we would find the majority of Americans highly pissed off—but I am not holding my breath on that either. The American blood being shed is also a very small cross section of our country.
As long as American's continue to show very little emotion or disgust with regard to the travesty of mythic stature in Iraq, our mainstream media will continue to provide us with nothing substantial. The bottom line is that it's our fault really, not theirs. We eat the pablum they shovel in our pieholes and ask for nothing more.
Where are the Daniel Ellsberg's, Carl Bernstein's and Bob Woodwards? They aren't out there and even if they were—would they take it all the way to our current Supreme Court in an effort to get the truth out to the world? I doubt it because the Supreme Court is bought and paid for too. Just ask the folks languishing in Guantanamo and awaiting their military tribunals. Ask the ACLU about how those warrant-less wiretapping cases are going and how many of them have been dismissed because of that disgusting phrase: State Secrets Privilege.
For BushCo it is game, set and match. And they skunked us bad folks. They fucked us and didn't even kiss us first.
Crossposted at UnCapitalist Journal
