The answer is Fear

[Frederik]

Excellent article by Robert Parry about the pusillanimity of the media in dealing with ShrubCo.

"It’s not fear of physical harm. That's not how it works in Washington. For the professionals in journalism and in intelligence, it’s a smaller, more corrosive fear – of lost status, of ridicule, of betrayal, of unemployment. It is the fear of getting blackballed from a community of colleagues or a profession that has given your life much of its meaning and its financial sustenance."

"This strategy took shape in the latter half of the 1970s amid the ashes of the Watergate scandal and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Conservatives were determined that those twin disasters – getting caught in a major political scandal and seeing the U.S. population turn against a war effort – should never happen again."

"The U.S. press was blamed for exposing President Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks and for spreading dissension that undermined morale in the Vietnam War. The CIA analysts had to be brought under control because the driving rationale for the conservative power grab was to be an exaggerated threat assessment of America’s enemies."

"Similarly, in the 1990s, mainstream journalists wrote more harshly about President Clinton than they normally would because they wanted to show that they could be tougher on a Democrat than a Republican. This approach was not journalistically sound – reporters are supposed to be equal-opportunity abusers – but it made psychological sense for journalists who knew how vulnerable they were, having seen how easily the careers of other capable journalists had been destroyed."

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/052605.html