The Fourth Estate Continues To Fail

There isn't a doubt in my mind that the national press are incompetent at best and bordering on treasonous at worst.  An independent Fourth Estate they most definitely are not.  For the last fifteen years they have persisted in reporting one side of the story, the GOP side, no matter what the circumstances and no matter what the story.  Fair, balanced and objective no longer seem to be the operating requirements for "journalists".  In depth reporting has gone the way of the dinosaur and bloggers have had to take up the slack.

The press, along with what passes for Congress for that matter, breathlessly reports in glowing terms or jumps to do the bidding of anything that the GOP wants.  Virtually without exception and definitely without question.  There have been a few that haven't followed the party line but it's more like throwing a few slices of bread to the masses and then they "see the light" and fall back into line.

I've watched in amazement and with quite a bit of disgust as they hang on to every word that anyone named Cheney utters, determined to anoint them as the second coming of the GOP.  Torture? Not a problem for anyone except what they term the liberal left or foreigners that don't know what they are talking about because they didn't suffer through 9/11 and therefore don't know anything about the effects of terrorism.  Heaven forbid that they should accurately report what torture is or that it is against the law in the United States and around the world and that it doesn't make us safer but it does make us less trusted.

If the press had done their job objectively before the 2000 election the outcome would have been much different.  If they had done their job after 9/11 the United States would not have been hoodwinked into invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 (I'm sorry but I can't use 9/11 twenty five times in one article), had no weapons of mass destruction and wasn't a threat to the United States.  But they didn't and as a result hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children either died or are suffering miserably.  And that includes citizens and taxpayers of the United States.

If the press were doing their job objectively today, Cheney and his family would not receive the exposure they are getting and it most certainly wouldn't be as positive.  Last week there were not dueling speeches between the President and a former Vice President, there was a Presidential speech (that I didn't bother listening to because it wasn't necessary) and a rant from an angry, fearful coward who knows he broke the law and doesn't want to go to jail.  But not to the press, not even remotely.  Cheney is being held up as the man who has our national security interests at heart and Obama doesn't.

When I was a young girl in the sixties, the New York Times was the paper of record and in the seventies the Washington Post was the leader in exposing the Watergate scandal.  Today neither one can be depended upon for objective reporting and then they wonder why newspapers are folding for lack of readership.  They can blame it on Craigslist or Twitter but the truth of the matter is that the press doesn't do their job of reporting the news, they are too busy trying to make the news into something that pleases their masters.   Which amounts to inane babble that informs no one and prevents the truth from being revealed.

The press spends their time carrying water for people who only care about themselves and their so-called legacy and refuse to see that they are repeating the mistakes that got us into the Iraq debacle in the first place.  Once again while the US is preoccupied with straw men, North Korea is not only rattling it's saber, it's testing nuclear weapons and threatening its neighbors.  And the press?  They are concerned with how wonderful Cheney is and why the Obama administration relies on background briefings instead of giving them every name, rank and serial number of their sources.  As if the Bush administration was as open as possible.  Is Jennifer Loven serious?  I don't remember any complaints when Bush and Cheney quoted unnamed sources stating that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or when Jeff Gannon was masquerading as a reporter.  If I was President Obama I would start calling on the smaller news outlets exclusively and ignore the hypocritical Cheney ass kissers such as the AP, NY Times and the Washington Post.  And that isn't arrogance, it's common sense since the press is going to make up the story they want anyway.  Just like they have done for the last fifteen years.

BBB