Tim Russert Is A Whore (and Other Random Thoughts About the Corporate Media)

Kos has this to say about all the criminal and ethics investigations currently causing turmoil within the GOP ranks:

What's amazing is that all [this] sleaze and corruption has bubbled forth while the GOP controls the entire governmental apparatus. Imagine if we had the Senate and/or House and subpoena powers?

I'll add this to Kos's remarks: Imagine if we had a mainstream press in this country which was willing to do its job and cover these and other issues important to the nation.

How many of you have clear memories on how things were in this country in the months prior to America's invasion of Iraq? Well, I do, and a few things stand out in my mind.

I'll never forget when, in June of 2002, a computer disc containing a White House Power Point presentation was found in D.C.'s Lafayette Park referring to Karl Rove's strategy to put political pressure on Congress by "focus[ing] on the war" in the run-up to the 2002 Mid-term elections.

I'll never forget political cowards like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry folding in the face of this political pressure and actually voting to authorize Bush to invade Iraq.

And I'll never forget when MSNBC cancelled Phil Donahue's show in early 2003 even though it was MSNBC's highest rated program at the time. Why was Donahue's show cancelled? Read it and weep:

[T]his occurred, according to published reports, after a study commissioned by NBC described Donahue as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace" who would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war" (All Your TV, 2/25/03). "He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives," the report noted, warning that the Donahue show could be "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

Network insiders echoed these qualms. In an email leaked to the website All Your TV (3/5/03), one executive suggested that MSNBC could take advantage of the "anticipated larger audience who will tune in during a time of war" to "reinvent itself" and "cross-pollinate our programming" by linking pundits to war coverage. "It's unlikely that we can use Phil in this way, particularly given his public stance on the advisability of the war effort," the email said.

This is what happens when huge corporations take control of the media. Dan Rather spoke about this "new journalism order" at Fordham University School of Law last month. Rather said that "politicians 'of every persuasion' had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks."

Since many of these big conglomerates also have holdings in the defense and oil industries, stories that are critical of U.S. policies are often censored. At no time in our recent history was this more apparent that in the months before the Iraq War. I've long felt that the Corporate Media are just as responsible for our ongoing embarrassment in Iraq as any of the BushCo Neo-Fascists are. Being mad at Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the Neo-Cons for acting like a bunch of nazis is like being mad at a shark for biting your arm off.

Neo-Cons, after all, don't know any better. Members of the media, however, should have known better, or at least they should have made it a goal to know better and pass this knowledge on to the citizenry instead of merely striving to satisfy their corporate masters by cheerleading for a corrupt administration from the sidelines.

For example, after Colin Powell gave his now infamous pre-war WMD speech at the U.N. in early 2003 -- you know, the one where he basically said that Saddam was more dangerous than Hitler ever was -- a vigilant media should have pointed out that Powell, on February 24, 2001, said during a press conference in Cairo that Saddam "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction" and that Saddam was "unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

Or, after Condi Rice made one of her scary "mushroom cloud over NYC" remarks in the run-up to the Iraq Catastrophe, a vigilant member of the media might have asked her, "If all this is so, Ms. Rice, why then did you make these comments to CNN's John King back in July 2001?" --

[I]n terms of Saddam Hussein being there, let's remember that his country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.

Instead, the Mainstream Media ignored these important angles to the story, failed to ask the obvious questions, and allow BushCo to execute the PNAC playbook and march this country off to an unnecessary war.

True, certain members of the corporate media did come out of their comas for a couple weeks to blast the Bush Regime for its pathetic handling of the Katrina catastrophe, but the Federal Government's incompetence was so over-the-top in the days following that hurricane's landfall that no other type of reporting was possible. And it now appears that some in the media have returned to their state of slumber.

For example, in recent CNN and MSNBC coverage of the DeLay indictment, news personalities repeatedly cited Delay's accusation that Prosecutor Ronnie Earle is a "partisan fanatic" and an "unabashed partisan zealot" who is prosecuting DeLay for purely political reasons, but left out the interesting fact that most of the politicians Earle has prosecuted have been Democrats.

Tim Russert recently drove into the cul-de-sac of pointlessness by nitpicking the details behind the death of a man's mother. What's wrong, Tim -- not enough other news for you to cover these days?

The mainstream media pretty much ignored the Frist Insider Trading Scandal when it first broke. I've seen a little more coverage on this lately, but not much.

And sure, we all know that Cindy Sheehan got arrested in D.C. a couple of weekends ago, but were you aware that over 100,000 people showed up for the anti-war protest there? I didn't realize this until I saw a Daily Show segment on it.

We know pretty much every detail of the story behind the most recent young, pretty white woman who has gone missing, as well as the specifics behind model Kate Moss's purported drug problem. The mainstream media, however, do not seem to have much of an interest in fostering a fully informed citizenry when it comes to issues that really matter.

What's the solution? Well, I know what I'd do if I was in Congress and the Democrats took back control in 2006. I'd call for an investigation of the corporate media and the role they played in causing this country to start a war in which nearly 2000 American troops have died for nothing and over $200 billion has been drained needlessly from America's coffers. And the goal of this investigation should be to develop legislation geared toward ensuring that something like this never happens again. And if that means spoiling some of the control the conglomerates have over our broadcast networks and the rest of the mainstream press, so be it.

As Dan Rather noted a couple weeks ago in his speech at Fordham Law School, this is not a purely Republican-spawned problem. After all, it was Bill Clinton who, in 1996, signed the Telecommunications Act into law, thus eliminating the cap on the number of broadcast stations a single company could own nationally. Congress should consider repealing that specific portion of the act.

Over two decades ago, the AT&T monopoly was broken up merely to give Americans more of a choice and to promote competition. Isn't true freedom of the press as least as important as that?