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While I have criticized the business plan of HuffPost for not paying writers, I reserve the right to praise a cogent piece by Ariana Huffington on the unconscionable silence of the media in the face of revelations that the Pentagon planted shills as media sources in order to sell the lies which justified the Bush-Cheney War in Iraq.
I urge you to read the entire article to gain insight into the dismal decline of the media in this country. It is not enough to blame the dismal cable channels and the declining network shows. This issue goes to the declining TOP of reputable media. And apparently not even the omnipresent Howard Kurtz can budge the quiescence to which this piece refers.
The last ten days have been among the most shameful in the history of American journalism.On April 20th, the New York Times published its expose of the Bush administration’s use of Pentagon-approved, prepped, and financially-enriched “military analysts” to appear on TV to help sell the invasion of Iraq, and then put a positive spin on the occupation — even as conditions on the ground deteriorated.
It was a powerful illustration of the Bush administration’s commitment to propaganda and disinformation. But it was also a damning indictment of the mainstream media’s complicity in the wholesale deception of the American public on the single most important decision a country can make — the decision to go to war.
How big a story was it? John Stauber of the Center for Media and Democracy called it the Pentagon Papers of the Iraq war.
So it only stands to reason that a story this explosive would quickly become the subject of extensive follow-ups by TV and print journalists, and endless debate on the political talk shows, right?
Wrong.
Instead of opening their reportorial and analytical floodgates, the mainstream news media have all but ignored the story.
The Times did a brief followup to its original story and, six days later, published a single editorial. Howard Kurtz wrote about the story the next day in his WaPo column and discussed it on CNN. Keith Olbermann and Wolf Blitzer gave it brief mentions. And that’s about it.
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“Abba’s Way” states: Unprecedented would be Jesus stating today what he was, and is, about.
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