On a week where actual journalist David Halberstam dies and paid for shills holds sway, where more devastating car bombs and stonewalling desperate White House Officials burn out shredder engines, Frank Rich...the master surgeon, eviscerates the limp dick Party-at-the-White-House Press on covering the casus beli.
... the football star’s supposed death in battle in Afghanistan, ... was a complete fabrication, told to the world (and Tillman’s parents) even though top officers already suspected he had died by friendly fire. The White House apparently decided to join the Pentagon in maintaining that lie so that it could be milked for P.R. purposes on two television shows, the correspondents’ dinner on May 1, 2004, and a memorial service for Tillman two days later...Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004. By the next day top officers knew he had not been killed by enemy fire. On April 29, a top special operations commander sent a memo to John Abizaid, among other generals, suggesting that the White House be warned off making specific public claims about how Tillman died. Simultaneously, according to an e-mail that surfaced last week, a White House speechwriter contacted the Pentagon to gather information about Tillman for use at the correspondents’ dinner...
To pick just one overarching example: much of the press still takes it as a given that Iraq has a functioning government that might meet political benchmarks (oil law, de-Baathification reform, etc., etc.) that would facilitate an American withdrawal. In reality, the Maliki "government" can’t meet any benchmarks, even if they were enforced, because that government exists only as a fictional White House talking point. As Gen. Barry McCaffrey said last week, this government doesn’t fully control a single province. Its Parliament, now approaching a scheduled summer recess, has passed no major legislation in months. Iraq’s sole recent democratic achievement is to ban the release of civilian casualty figures, lest they challenge White House happy talk about "progress" in Iraq.
It’s our country’s bitter fortune that while David Halberstam is gone, too many Joe Alsops still hold sway. Take the current dean of the Washington press corps, David Broder, who is leading the charge in ridiculing Harry Reid for saying the obvious — that "this war is lost" (as it is militarily, unless we stay in perpetuity and draft many more troops). In February, Mr. Broder handed down another gem of Beltway conventional wisdom, suggesting that "at the very moment the House of Representatives is repudiating his policy in Iraq, President Bush is poised for a political comeback."
This is perhaps why I believe that we are the new media. We’re the biggest example of a node of truth and intelligence and skepticism that is lacking in almost all major media outlets.
Rich makes the point that it wasn’t the president who was the target of Stephen Colbert last year. It was the stenographer press that got nothing wrong, and didn’t seem to care.
It’s sad and ironic that there is more actual analysis in 4 hours of comedy a week ( Stewart and Colbert) than there is on almost all the rest of it together.
Thank God for the internet. And frankly, thank God for places like this.
http://select.nytimes.com/...