Via Atrios, Eric Boehlert has a post up at Media Matters that knees the establishment media in the balls, pushes them to the ground, punches and kicks them repeatedly, then watches helplessly as the self-same media shits continue to go on air to again to profess that no one could have possibly known that Bush was lying, or that the war was a fraud.
[A] key turning point during that public rush to war was Kennedy’s fervent and thoughtful speech. It was a turning point because it highlighted, months before the invasion even took place, how the press was going to deal with high-profile, articulate critics of Bush’s war policy. The press was going to downplay them, marginalize them, and ignore them. Even if those critics included high-wattage political stars like Ted Kennedy.
That night on NBC’s Nightly News, just 32 words from the Kennedy address were excerpted. On ABC’s World News Tonight, it was 31 words. And on the CBS Evening News, 40 words. In all three instances, the brief mention of the Kennedy speech was part of a larger report on the looming possibility of war. Meaning, on none of the networks did Kennedy’s speech qualify as a stand-alone news event.
The address was given on a Friday. Two days later on the Sunday talk shows, where Iraq was discussed in detail, Kennedy’s name never came up on NBC’s Meet the Press, on CBS’ Face the Nation, or on ABC’s This Week.
For the network pundits, Kennedy’s anti-war speech did not exist. It was irrelevant to the around-the-clock media chatter about a looming war.
The Kennedy coverage in the major newspapers wasn’t much better. At The Washington Post, Kennedy’s newsworthy speech, a clarion call against Bush’s pre-emptive war, garnered exactly one sentence — 36 words total in coverage. Keep in mind, during 2002, the Post published more than 1,000 articles and columns about Iraq, nearly 1 million words. But the Post set aside just 36 words for Kennedy’s farsighted war speech.
What was so remarkable was that Kennedy delivered his address at the time when there was already a media narrative unfolding about how Democrats, anxious about the political ramifications of not supporting a then-popular president, were not voicing stiff opposition to the planned invasion.
Two days before Kennedy gave his speech, the Post detailed in an A1 article how “[d]ozens of congressional Democrats are frustrated with their leadership for rushing to embrace President Bush’s Iraqi war resolution and fostering an impression the party overwhelmingly backs a unilateral strike against Saddam Hussein.”
When Kennedy stepped forward and answered the specific issue raised by the Post, what did the newspaper do? It devoted 36 words to Kennedy’s address.
Click the link for details from Ted’s speech, a speech that clearly spells out why this war was wrong, a speech our national media roundly ignored.
The time has come to rewrite Shakespeare and take the lawyers off the hook. What that line in Henry VI should have said was, “The first thing we do, is kill all the pundits.”
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Driving around listening to Talk of the Nation, I got to hear Ari Fleischer stick about a dozen very dull knives in Little Scotty’s back.
I give it until the end of the week before they out him as gay. (After all, it’s taken an exceptionally accommodating press to keep him in the closet this long.) His unfortunate demise (suicide, most likely) won’t come for a couple of months. Don’t want to be too obvious about it, now do we?
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City Pages has a new cover story out on The GOPfathers: The 10 most powerful Minnesota Republicans.
Well, OK. Even I have heard of five of these “power brokers you’ve never heard of,” but still, not a bad list. And not one rightwing blogger on it. Not one.
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Lou and Rush are in for it now. Obama has called them out by name:
At a fundraiser in Florida Thursday night, Barack Obama accused anti-immigrant crusaders Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh of “ginning things up” to such an extent that there was a rise in hate crimes against Hispanics last year.
“A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There’s a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year,” Obama said. “If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it’s not surprising that would happen.”
I’ll be honest here. I’m not going to be happy until pitchfork and torch-wielding mobs are hammering at the doors of Clear Channel and CNN round the clock 7/52. These lying sonsuvbitches promote racism and hate in innumerable ways every goddamned day, and are no more fit to gab on our airwaves than the murderous fucks from Radio Rwanda.
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Howie the Whore explains why he didn’t take the buyout.
I think it’s because his value to his political masters would be next to zilch if he wasn’t (inexplicably) the WaPost’s media critic.
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Eric Black spells out why Lori Swanson (who I voted for in the primary and general) is possibly the worst Attorney General we’ve ever had.
I wouldn’t care to argue the point. If she was any worse, I’d actually prefer she be replaced by a Republican. Fortunately, she’s not that bad. The point of Black’s column is that Mike Hatch was much, much worse.
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Rough day all around. If you’re feeling as beat up as I am, you might want to check out the healing power of this video that could have only have come from Japan, home of intergalactic levels of Michael Jackson weirdiosity.
That or maybe Vegas.
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