By Denis Campbell

We’ve fallen down a media rabbit-hole and there is no way back. Senators, Representatives and UK MPs say whatever they want and are assured their corporate media interviewer mouthpieces will not have the spine to pin them down or ask tough questions about the ridiculous nature of the partisan pronouncements. Why, because of one word “access.” Rock the boat and risk breaking the symbiotic, need-based, dinosaur dance passing as real journalism. The Main Stream Media (MSM) fight for survival and the press corps has long given up on anything resembling investigative or objective journalism. There is no way Woodward and Bernstein break open the Watergate story if it happened in 2009.

Real investigative journalism risks the cushy leather seat press gaggles on the politician’s plane or bus. Too, if a reporter plays the game wisely, it leads to big-time promotions or cushy corporate PR gigs when their time is up reporting “news.” They then work to craft the message and build a huge favour bank.

Media instead hides behind a “fairness or equal time doctrine.” Under the construct of equal time for all (worthy) parties, politicians deflect at will any question or premise they do not like. This enables them to answer with nonsensical or patently false non-answers. They are then thanked taking time from their busy schedule as they lay out ‘their’ agenda and score points.

Here in the UK, it is so silly that protocol says MPs and Ministers never have to face anyone below their rank offering an opposing view. Inded they ften get only 1:1 with the interviewer or they are left scrambling at the last minute to find a replacement.

In the US you will occasionally see Senators or Congressmen/women debate briefly but rarely do you see a pundit taking on a legislator 1:1. So tough questions may be asked, even 2-3 times in a minute, but almost never get answered and there is neither risk or consequence for NOT answering nor a reporter becoming indignant or hostile in his/her cross-examination.

Opposition parties in the US and UK used the crisis in Iran this week to score dangerous political talking points. The Sunday news shows yesterday were filled with “respected voices” uttering political blather about Iran in hushed and serious tones. But it was blather nonetheless.

President Obama has taken a cautious path through what can only be a minefield for US interests across the Gulf. After 8-years and two wars it was refreshing to see a non-Rambo response.

NBC’s Meet the Press though had host David Gregory throwing softballs and allowing Republican partisan silliness on air as Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Fred Thompson (R-TN), “two respected former Senators,” refused to back off party talking points. ABC’s George Stephanopoulis had Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) saying Obama was “weak and timid” regarding Iran. Bob Schieffer of CBS’ Face the Nation had John McCain (R-AZ) urging the US to “be on the right side of history” and attack the Iranian regime. None of it is helpful to defusing the situation.

In the UK Gordon Brown has been similarly cautious with the situation, summoning the Iranian Ambassador to Number 10 twice this week for consultation. Did the Tories remain silent? Nope, David Cameron called, in two meetings this week, for “sanctions against the Iranian Government.”

An opposition party’s role is to be contrary and yet all decided to use a global crisis (where they would have been criticised if the same stunts were pulled against them for political opportunity) to score cheap points. The Republicans and the Tories took from the film “The Matrix” the blue pill, sat on the sidelines and threw spitballs. The corporate media allowed them to speak patent nonsense. And none of the second guessing helped anyone.

The Republicans are in full melt-down and seem incapable of keeping their mouths shut for even one minute. Imagine the outcry if in September 2001, Democrats started spewing anti-war craziness just to say NO! It would have been party suicide, yet the Republican lemming talking point cliff march continues.

The most bizarre was (Senator Saxby Chamblis, R-GA… and in main video box right) who asserted there is no way the Iranians remember 60-years ago we overthrew their lawfully elected government in 1953 and installed the Shah!? Was he hoping a once conquered and beaten nation would join in our collective national amnesia and forget the uprising in 1979? For those not remembering a history we are now condemned to repeat, that uprising led to a takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran where 51 Americans were held hostage for 444 days in a revolution that installed most of the protagonists in the current drama.

Several times this past week my shoe almost went through the television screen as Republican “leaders” stirred the pot using their familiar military industrial complex rhetoric. And not one member of fourth estate dared question or even called them on their statements, even at the height ridiculousness. When hardliner Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is allowed to become the sane voice of reason in this region (Meet the Press), we’re all in trouble.

The current Iranian crisis has a brutal totalitarian regime censoring news, firing at will upon protestors and seeing specially designed technology from Nokia and Siemens used to stop text messaging and Internet access. News is filtered either from the signal controlled Tehran network news bureaus (with guards off-screen waiting to arrest the local bureau chief newsreader if there is a misstatement) or broadcast directly from Iranian State Television studios. Journalists have gone missing. Nico Pitney of The Huffington Post has been live-blogging non-stop since the crisis began and 457 people have been arrested.

Nada, the young woman shown bleeding out from a gunshot wound to the chest and dying on YouTube, has become an international symbol of martyrdom every bit as gripping as the lone Chinese man standing in front of and stopping a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square.

Media from around the globe do not know how to ask tough questions and, most importantly, tell ego-maniac media hungry Senators and MPs to stop, shut-up and mind their tongues. The whole world is watching and listening. And it’s not though about them.