Incredible (But Not Surprising)

From Media Matters:

On the January 20 edition of CNN's Your World Today, homeland security correspondent Jeanne Meserve interviewed Tom Ridge, former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as part of a report on the DHS' decision not to raise the national threat level following Osama bin Laden's recent warning of future attacks against the United States. Meserve aired Ridge's opinion that the threat level should not be raised "based solely on the [bin Laden] tape." But, while interviewing Ridge about the threat-level decisions, Meserve failed to raise an obvious issue with Ridge: In May 2005, Ridge told an audience at a Washington, D.C., forum that while head of DHS, he had regularly been pressured by Bush administration officials to raise the threat level even though he did not believe that intelligence warranted it.

Unless Jeanne Meserve is a complete idiot, there is no way Ridge's 2005 admission could have slipped her mind. She -- or someone pulling her strings at CNN -- decided that such an inquiry would be off limits.

Of course, this is pretty much standard operating procedure for the Corporate Media these days. As Eric Boehlert pointed out last week:

One of the most depressing traits of the news media's timid performance during the Bush years has been their newfound fear of facts and the consequences of reporting them. Where Beltway journalists once eagerly corralled facts and dispensed them to the public, scribes today, like youngsters' endless checking to see if it's safe to cross the street, over-think the consequences and end up giving the Bush administration and Republicans a pass.

CNN, however, has more on its mind than merely playing it safe. It wants to attract FoxNews viewers, and you can't do that and simultaneously present the news in an intellectually honest fashion.

There can be no doubt that CNN is trying to attract FoxNews viewers. Why else would it hire Glenn Beck to host a prime time program on its Headline News channel. For those of you who aren't familiar with Beck, let's just say that he would have certainly been allowed to host his own show in Nazi Germany had he lived back then, although Hitler would have probably insisted that he tone it down a bit. You can read about Glenn Beck here.

One of these days, CNN is going to figure out that George W. Bush is unpopular and that reporting factual material that puts Bush in a bad light might actually help its ratings. CNN's reporters wouldn't have to look too hard for such material, given that the current U.S. administration is the most corrupt in a generation.