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View Full Version : The media vs the government


D_Raay
07-03-2006, 04:14 AM
This week, the conservatives declared war.

They declared war on the idea that journalists have not just the right but the obligation to hold those in power accountable for their actions. They declared war on the idea that journalists, not the government and not a political party, get to decide what appears in the press. They declared war on the idea that the public has a right to know what the government is doing in our name.

I think that this is just a staged event to make the media look like they are still the watchdog on government abuse. This one story, about the financial tracking, is so minor it is hard to understand why the government got so upset over this one story. At the same time, if the media really were taking the government to task, there are so many more stories the media could be doing, such as using the word "lie" to describe Bush's pre-invasion claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, or the strange way the Secret Service just let Bush sit there reading about goats while the World Trade Center and Pentagon were being attacked.

Of course I could be wrong...

Funkaloyd
07-03-2006, 07:04 AM
It's been a standard response to media criticism for a while now. Remember the Koran desecration story? They got Newsweek to apologize for publishing a story which was later confirmed by multiple sources.

Also, those things you mentioned just aren't news anymore. It's 1942, and the Reichstag fire and Poland are yesterday's bread.