On Diane Rheim: Reporters are placing the blame for bad Iraq reporting on:

[Tyler Durden]

THE DEMOCRATS.

They were writing the stories about the bad reasons for war, and the foolishness of abandoning Afghanistan, but the public wasn't listening and WHO'S FAULT WAS IT????

THE "OPPOSITION PARTY" NOT MAKING A BIG STINK ABOUT IT, SO THEY HAD TO REPORT "THE BIG STORIES."

Oh my fucking god.

[MountainLaurel]

1. Um

:wow:

[BlooInBloo]

2. And the republican/press team gets even tighter.

[Kolesar]

3. But Diane Rehm will make time for the warmongers at American Enterprise Institute

:scream:

[Tyler Durden]

4. And on Wednesday before the MOYERS piece, NPR gave KRISTOL the mike.

And nobody stood up and said BULLSHIT when Kristol said the biggest positive change in McCain was that he now supported the "fact" that the tax cuts worked.

[no_hypocrisy]

5. I made up better excuses than that when I was a kid . . . Sheesh, amateurs!

[annabanana]

6. Really now. . .

that's pretty damn funny.

[OHdem10]

7. At the time, many of us were saying

to Democrats, "Get a spine", I can remember even
Howard Dean once threatening(kidding of course) to
perform spinal Implant operations on them.

Here is the problem with the Media Argument.

So the WH gives out their line--the Dems respond.

We have 2 different opinions---NOT NECESSARILY TRUTH.

The Media in US do the country great harm because
a long time ago they caved and do not seek the truth.
They should not get the big salries simply because
they take no risk.

They give the WH Line if Dems do not respond, Media
lets WH Line stand as gsspel truth. Lazy, and irresponsible.

I thought everyone knew this and just accepted it.

[Tyler Durden]

8. The News Outlets are NOT ENTERTAINMENT SHOWS.

In MY cosmology, if you don't report HARD, HONEST NEWS, then calling yourself NEWS is FALSE ADVERTISING.

[blogslut]

9. They did that in Moyer's report too

Even Pincus. Don't get me wrong, my party flopped along without a backbone during the run-up to war, but man, this excuse the press gives, is a total cop out.

[Kolesar]

18. Most of the Democrats in the House voted against the Iraq War Resolution....eom

[riderinthestorm]

20. And completely ignores the reality of millions marching globally

a fact the MSM refused to report on. It's doubly bitter that they are blaming THEIR abrogation of their reporting responsibilities on the Dems (who weren't very vocal) and ignore the story that was right in front of their face - millions of anti-war protesters shrieking in Washington DC alone (for those jackass reporters who couldn't get out of town to cover the damn story), and everywhere else on the planet.

[madmom]

10. let's see some of these stories they were writing,( links, printed articles etc.)

[NewJeffCT]

11. Plenty of Democrats raised a stink - the problem was

that unless their last name was "Lieberman" they tended to get shut out of the mainstream media...

[blm]

12. Russert set that ball in motion - blame the Democrats for the press not doing its job.

.

[riderinthestorm]

13. I heard that. No mention of the millions marching across this country before the war

and elsewhere who WERE listening, and hollering, and protesting, and working their asses off to get their voices heard. And the reporters were conspicuously silent about reporting THAT!! What irony to hear them say it's the Dems fault.

In fairness to Diane, this part of her show was dealing with the Bill Moyers special and she was all over everyone for their shitty reporting. She really endorsed Bill Moyers' position and if that comment hadn't come in the final minute of her program, I am dead cert she would have called them on their blaming the Dems. She in no uncertain terms blasted the press for their pre-war cheerleading and lack of due diligence in reporting facts.

I couldn't believe the one reporter on her show (can't remember his name) who said the reason HE didn't do more investigative reporting was because he was too busy buying a flak jacket and helmet for when he got to Iraq. Talk about fucking screwed up priorities!

[teamster633]

14. Yep.

The war was going to happen anyway and it's "hard work" getting ready for a war doncha know.

[riderinthestorm]

17. I'm not sure if you heard the program but the guy really DID say that!!!

"the war was going to happen anyway so investigative reporting that might cast doubt on the pRez was moot" (paraphrasing here but that was the gist!)

Unfuckingbelievable!

:puke:

[teamster633]

21. Yes, I did hear it, and yes, "unfuckingbelievable!"

I made up the "hard work" thing but it somehow seemed appropriate.

[Tyler Durden]

22. Not blaming Diane...

...she's much too classy a lady to throw her coffee in the face of the Whore From Newsweek.

[JHB]

15. Catch:22

It's been like this since the Reagan days:

The National Media won't spotlight Republican shady doings as a major story unless the Democratic Establishment starts pushing it (anybody less is just a "gadfly" or "maverick")

The Democratic Establishment won't push such a story unless it's become "conventional wisdom" (i.e., has been in the National Media spotlight for a while).

[Beausoleil]

16. The MSM abrogates their constitutional responsibilities to

the "opposition party". So their only responsibility now is to report on political devisiveness while the real stories go unreported. I see how this works now! They are not "watch dogs", obviously, but lap dogs. And not even doing a very good job at referreeing, they're on the sidelines being mascots to power!

[wryter2000]

19. Heard last night on ABC news

Paraphrasing "The President will veto this bill, and the Democrats will pass another one that gives him what he wants. Today's vote will only be symbolic."

Who told him we'd pass another one that gives * what he wants?

Did these aholes not watch Moyers the other night?

[Peace Patriot]

23. Interesting argument. Some truth to it. But like any grain of truth that the

war profiteering corporate news monopolies and the fascist 'think tanks' that write their 'talking points' get hold of, it becomes a genetically modified grain of wheat, designed for a one-season crop, then it self-terminates, after having killed all the lively grains around it--designed by mother nature to give us abundance and many failsafes against starvation--and thus, the monoculture of fascist ideas is created, and there is nothing else. We pay for their ugly little seeds or we get nothing.

Democrats being responsible for the lies that the war profiteering corporate news monopolies promulgated for Bush's war is a genetically modified organism.

Designed to kill. Designed to die. Designed to starve us. Designed to turn us into slaves.

But the beauty of nature--as of democracy--is that it keeps trying to create the abundance that we all need and crave.

Our wonderful, creative, uncontrollable brains are even now trying to expel this bad seed and to seek the wider, deeper information and analysis that we need in order to exercise our rightful power as a democratic people.

Democracy will win, in the end--just as nature will win, in the end--because variety provides safety, and with monoculture, there is none. It is already evident. 75% of the American people have REJECTED the war profiteering corporate news monopoly MONOCULTURE OF NARROW PRO-WAR OPINION. They don't believe them. They have resisted their propaganda. And, in truth, the majority resisted it from the beginning (Feb. '03--56% of the American people opposed the invasion of Iraq, even before Colin Powell's 100% pack of lies to the UN was fully exposed).

Another interesting fact: 156 Congress members voted AGAINST the Iraq War Resolution. Know how many Congress members voted against the "Gulf of Tonkin" Resolution in 1964 (big escalation of the Vietnam War)? Two.

We're learning. Democracy is winning. I know it's hard to see, being in the midst of a fascist junta. But consider this: Why does it take 24/7 lying, deceitful war propaganda--all day, every day, nothing but war propaganda, by corporate news monopolies--to try to convince the American people that we are not a peace-minded people, that most of us want war? And why did they have to fast-track electronic voting run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by Bushite corporations--code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it--with virtually no audit/recount controls, all over the country in the 2002 to 2004 period?

If you are going to perpetrate an unjust, illegal, heinous war, in a democracy--especially one with the Vietnam War in living memory--you have to fix the elections. That's what they did.

And these rat bastards in the corporate media helped them do it. That's the OTHER thing they put an "Iron Curtain" over--besides American public opinion--and that of half the Democratic Party leadership--against the war. The coup of Bushite-controlled electronic voting. Also Bushite vote suppression against black voters.

Now THIS is a "grain of truth" that could truly grow and not be dead on arrival: That the war profiteering corporate news monopolies FAILED to warn us about e-voting because of the Democratic Party leadership's mind-boggling silence on the matter. And THIS lifelong Democrat is spitting mad at our leadership because of it. Not one of them--not one!--stood up against this. NOT ONE!

Of course, I'm convinced that the war profiteering corporate news monopolies doctored their exit polls, on election night 2004, to match the results of Diebold/ES&S's secret formulae, in conscious collusion with the Bush Junta. They are responsible for their own crime. They can't blame the Democrats for their own complicity. What they SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING was exposing BOTH parties for destroying our election system in order to force the American people into a war we didn't want.

You wonder why half the Democratic leadership agreed to give Bush the power to start his own war? Because IF they hadn't helped pass the Iraq War Resolution (IWR), there would have been time for more debate in Congress, on a genuine, Constitutional declaration of war. And IF there had been time for more debate, the lies about Iraq's WMDs would have been quickly exposed. They were known worldwide. What Congress said to Bush was go to the UN. And what did the UN say? "NO! We don't buy this. We think it's trumped up. Let our weapons inspectors finish their job." And if they had finished their job? There would have been NO justification for war. They were weeks away from their conclusion that Iraq had NO WMDs. The Democrats who voted for the IWR prevented that debate from taking place.

And the next thing they did was pass the "Help America Vote For Bush Act" (10/02). $3.9 billion to fast-track e-voting for 2004, with Bushite corporations in charge of the secret code.

I blame our leadership for this. Christopher Dodd and Terry McAuliffe in particular--but every one of our leaders is STILL SILENT ABOUT IT--every goddamned one of them. No exceptions. (Their bandaid on it--a "paper trail" and a lousy stinking 2% audit--is laughable. It fails to address the secret code. In fact, it enshrines the secret code.) Let this "seed of truth" be known, and let the war profiteering corporate news monopolies and our Democratic leaders point fingers at one another for which one of them was more silent about the end of public votec counting in the USA. I wouldn't mind seeing that cat fight.

[Kolesar]

24. My theory is that the election night polls had *nothing* to take into account the voter purges

...and lost votes due to the long lines at the Ohio polling locations. So, the polling companies had models that assumed that everybody who would normally vote would get a chance to have their vote counted. (Just a theory for now)

Check out this film about a polling location in Cleveland in 2004:
www.noumbrella.org

edit: dot o r g !