I’ve been angrily watching George Bush and Karl Rove lie with impunity. Living abroad for 10-years their FCC appointees systematically took decisions that eliminated media accountability, competition and created a war propaganda machine for the Administration using the public airwaves. A we saw in the financial crisis, a very few, very rich, white men were allowed to take over control of the Main Stream Media (MSM).
Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone, Clear Channel and a handful of others then put corporate pressure on their new chew-toy newsrooms to keep their hands off the president and their advertising pals. What was once a sacrosanct Great Chinese Wall between editorial and marketing/publishing now has more leaks than the gutted Glass Steagall Bill (thanks to the handiwork of former Senator Phil Gramm that protected banks cash from investment bank shady deals by allowing them to marry.)
When FOX anchors can say they are unbiased with a straight face and yell at anyone who questions them is a joke. The FCC has done away with most equal time restrictions, cable is just an open season cesspit and the separation between church and state in media is almost non-existent. Indeed in the name of fairness and equal time, real investigative journalism has been left to those of us in the blogosphere because the MSM corporate media equates access with news (or at least future employment) thus when you see a reporter embedded with a combat or other policing unit, you wonder whether or not the 1st two letters should be “in”.
National News groups have always had more than enough arrogance to go around. But the death of appointment television means more and more people get news when they want or need it not when broadcast. That makes these dinosaurs look skyward for the asteroid, because the end could be that quickly for them.
Worse though is the bubble most MSM reporters live in on the campaign trail or in the White House Press Room. They get the same talking points over and over again, watch the same stump speeches 5-6 times each day in different cities and there is little so-called ‘access’ or professional distance on the part of pool reporters. They just can be better show-offs to the kids in high school who used to make fun of them. Most of the breaking news though this season has come from outside the pool and from the blogosphere, the group one pundit wondered during the primaries if, “everyone still lived with their mothers?”
What most concerns, is the next step and that appears to already be embedded in the news business. The Axis of Weasel is the blatant way in which a message is crafted by a President or a candidate, leaked to conservative Drudge Report or a number of right wing blog-sites and then picked up verbatim by FOX News as the gospel truth.
If you then watched the piteous and pitiful woman McCain staffer who sliced a backwards B (showing she did it in a mirror) in her face and concocting a blatantly racist, fear-mongering story that became overnight ‘shocking’ headline news… That is until the police, investigating the charge and smelling a rat from the start saw through the story and arrested HER for making a false report.
The scary part of this story is any ‘story’ of any kind can be leaked through this sieve and thrown against the wall where rumour-mongering and slick e-mail campaigns can be run to destroy good men and women.
For most of the last 10-years that ‘Axis of Weasel’ included the above three plus Rush Limbaugh and his ditto-heads, Pat Robertson and, before he died, Jerry Falwell.
When Barack Obama says they want to make this big election about small things, most are not buying into it. Thankfully, the electorate this year is taking this election very, very seriously and it isn’t working.
