Bring It On!

The Thing About Vacuums

Lots of very intelligent commentary going around about the New York Times article on how network and cable news deliberately crafted their message to conform to the Bush message on the war, and bolstered it with “experts” who had a financial stake in keeping the war going. It’s kind of amazing to read actual kick-ass, Pulitzer-level investigative journalism, expecially when the heat in on their own industries.

Eric Alterman over at Media Matters does a nice distillation of the salient points, here.  Several worth noting:

“Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.”

“The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.”

“Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as ‘message force multipliers’ or ’surrogates’ who could be counted on to deliver administration ‘themes and messages’ to millions of Americans ‘in the form of their own opinions.’ “

” ‘You could see that they were messaging,’ Brent Krueger, aide to former assistant secretary of defense for public affairs Torie Clarke, said. ‘You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.’ Some days, he added, ‘We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, “This is working.” ‘ “

Not coincidentially, in my mind, was the fact that this was all taking place in 2003 and beyond. What else was happening in 2003 and 2004? Blogs, you say?

Um, yeah.

Nice to know the bitching from all corners of the bloggoshere about the MSM was not just self justification and ego preening. There is a reason that individual citizens started poking into things that weren’t being reported straight by the MSM, and there is also a reason why some of those bloggers (FDL, Americablog, Raw Story, TPM, Glenn Greenwald and others) got their legs under them, started digging, and cranked out real investigative journalism.

Vacuums. That mother nature, she’s such a hoot!