A Little Bit Of Outrage For Your Afternoon

[filkertom]

Two articles you might want to read, both at The Smirking Chimp: Robert Parry's report on the press' screwing over of Al Gore, and Cindy Sheehan's anger at the mercenary army in Iraq... the one we pay for. (For further reading on this rather important subject -- effectively an unreported 100,000 extra Coalition soldiers -- read some of these articles by Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book Blackwater.)

Comments

[kestrels-nest.livejournal.com]

Blackwater USA is terrifying - essentially our president has a private mercenary army that he's kept under the radar.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

It's infuriating. He would have been such a fine president and this country would have been in such a different place. Actually, that would go for pretty much *anyone* else in the White House.

[alicetheowl.livejournal.com]

Interesting article about Gore. I'd've liked to have seen some refutation of the distortions slung about to try to obscure his point in An Inconvenient Truth. People keep pointing to his electricity bill as "proof" he uses more than his fair share, fully ignoring the fact that he pays more to use a cleaner form of energy.

I don't remember the taking credit for the Love Canal thing, but I do remember the much-repeated exaggerations about the internet and Love Story, and I remember being disgusted with it then, too.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I think the real problem is that the right wing has gotten a free pass for so long for screaming "liberal bias" every time the mainstream press reports any story, quote, or fact that didn't come straight from the Rush Limbaugh program that a lot of the country, the media companies, and the journalists themselves -- even those who consciously reject it -- have internalized the message. I don't think the treatment Gore gets is any different from the treatment any prominent Democrat gets. I wouldn't even mind that treatment -- much -- if the Republicans got an equal measure of it, but the press tends to treat the Republicans with kid gloves because if they are even moderately nasty to one of them the whole pack scream with one voice and drown out everything else. The media let Clinton get impeached for (maybe) lying about a blowjob, but they let Bush get away with blatantly lying us into a trillion dollar war, stealing two Presidential elections, and a thousand other criminal breaches of the public trust, up to the big story right now of how, having been caught red-handed firing US attorneys so they could be replaced with more reliable cronies (presumably, ones who would give top priority to bogus political charges), tells us repeatedly that he's being "generous" when he agrees to allow Rove to lie speak off the record not under oath to the Congress which is performing its Constitutionally mandated job of oversight.

I don't doubt that the majority of individuals involved in journalism are personally liberal, but between the misguided ethical standards that make neutrality more important than truth and the fact that the right wing is so much better than the left at manipulating the media, the actual bias of our media is so far to the right that we have a whole country that sees scientific reality as crazy left wing moonbattery at best on equal footing with the horoscope or the Sunday sermon.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

I've believed for a long, long time now that the whole Liberal Media Conspiracy was a concoction of Nixon's, and a brilliant bit of long-term strategy. You cannot disprove the existence of a conspiracy, and by its nature, a conspiracy actively works to eliminate all proof of its existence.

Of course, "liberal" didn't really become a dirty word until the 1988 presidential campaign. Same time "card-carrying member of the ACLU" became a smear.

So today, as you observe, the press bends over backwards to avoid being accused of liberal bias. In the name of "balance", they give equal time to the round-earthers and the flat-earthers.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

I heard an interview the other day with Scahill on NPR. Scary stuff, and yet another example of how the rights of all are being stomped upon and sold to the highest bidder at every turn, both here and abroad.

We are not being allowed to listen to the music we want; we are not being allowed to vote for the people we want to vote for;we are not being allowed to love the people we want to love (or, at least, we are not being treated equally if we do); and we are not being allowed NOT to be involved in a war we want no part of. It seems that whoever has the gold indeed makes the rules.