The Stirrings Of The Fourth Estate

For many years now journalism as we knew it has been falling apart. The media was meant to put a check on the abuses of power by the government. Now the norm is for 'journalists' to write government talking points verbatim without care or question. If you are going to all the ritzy parties and hob nobbing with important officials, why would you want to offend them in your articles?

The ultimate party has been the White House Correspondents Dinner. Nearly everyone in D.C. gets together to drink, laugh and network. Stephen Colbert sobered them up a bit with his scathing satirical humor last year. This time around they didn't want reality so up close and personal so they had Rich Little (who bombed) entertain the guests. A few days later, the New York Times had a revelation that maybe this whole thing about government/media bonding wasn't such a good thing.

So they pulled out of going from now on:

NEW YORK Tucked inside Frank Rich's Sunday column in the New York Times is indication that the newspaper will no longer play ball with the annual White House Correspondents Association dinners in Washington, which he calls "a crystallization of the press's failures in the post-9/11 era." He writes that the event "illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows....

"After last weekend's correspondents' dinner, The Times decided to end its participation in such events," wrote Rich. "But even were the dinner to vanish altogether, it remains but a yearly televised snapshot of the overall syndrome. The current White House, weakened as it is, can still establish story lines as fake as 'Mission Accomplished' and get a free pass."

Rich mixed this criticism of the press in with regret over the death of David Halberstam this week, who Rich said it would be hard to imagine "yukking it up with Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz and two discarded 'American Idol' contestants" at the dinner. "It's our country's bitter fortune that while David Halberstam is gone, too many Joe Alsops still hold sway," writes Rich, comparing the Pulitzer-winner to the now-forgotten Vietnam War cheerleading columnist.

Glad to see Frank Rich got it. It isn't just about the dinner, the problem goes on for 365 days a year (plus one next year). The Times made a good step forward, but only time will tell if their reporting will become more objective in the coming days, weeks and months. Hiding massive stories before an election because the President asked you to isn't exactly good journalism. So the Times still has a lot of making up to do.

Calling A Spade A Spade

Why does the media fear being blunt when describing the President's "misspoken" words and "misleading" characterizations. For the most part his propaganda is transcribed verbatim from his mouth to the pages of the nation's newspapers and onto television screens. It is a rare occurrence when someone in the press actually calls Bush what he is, a liar. A cowardly liar at that. Though there was a small shining light in the pages of the New York Times this week, and it came from Frank Rich.

Via AmericaBlog (just in case you don't subscribe to TimesSelect):

As if to confirm we’re in the last throes, President Bush threw any remaining caution to the winds during his news conference in the Rose Garden that same morning. Almost everything he said was patently misleading or an outright lie, a sure sign of a leader so entombed in his bunker (he couldn’t even emerge for the Washington Nationals’ ceremonial first pitch last week) that he feels he has nothing left to lose.

Incredibly, he chided his adversaries on the Hill for going on vacation just as he was heading off for his own vacation in Crawford. Then he attacked Congress for taking 57 days to “pass emergency funds for our troops” even though the previous, Republican-led Congress took 119 days on the same bill in 2006. He ridiculed the House bill for “pork and other spending that has nothing to do with the war,” though last year’s war-spending bill was also larded with unrelated pork, from Congressional efforts to add agricultural subsidies to the president’s own request for money for bird-flu preparation.

Mr. Bush’s claim that military equipment would be shortchanged if he couldn’t sign a spending bill by mid-April was contradicted by not one but two government agencies. A Government Accountability Office report faulted poor Pentagon planning for endemic existing equipment shortages in the National Guard. The Congressional Research Service found that the Pentagon could pay for the war until well into July. Since by that point we’ll already be on the threshold of our own commanders’ late-summer deadline for judging the surge, what’s the crisis?

The president then ratcheted up his habitual exploitation of the suffering of the troops and their families — a button he had pushed five days earlier when making his six-weeks-tardy visit to pose for photos at scandal-ridden Walter Reed. “Congress’s failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines,” he said. “And others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to.”

Amen!