Whatever brought Tucker down, (and he was acquitted, BTW), you have to ask, "Cui bono?"

To this day, apologists are still arguing that there was no "conspiracy" to tear up all the electric trolley lines (less pollution) in cities across America. Ted Nace draws the comparison between that and Enron in the foreword to his book:

Gangs of America

The Rise of Corporate Power and the

Disabling of Democracy

You can read it, or even download it free, on line, (he made his millions in a corporation of his own, desktop publishing)

http://www.gangsofamerica.com/gangsofamerica.pdf

On the morning of August 2, 2002, millions of Americans turned on their TVs to see an unusual spectacle: a high-level corporate executive in handcuffs, being paraded by law enforcement officials in front of the news camera. The executive was Scott Sullivan, chief financial officer of telecommunications firm WorldCom. Along with fellow executive David Myers, Sullivan was charged with hiding $3.85 billion in company expenses, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and filing false information with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The combined maximum penalties from the charges were 65 years. In response to the arrests, attorney general John Ashcroft told reporters, “Corporate executives who cheat investors, steal savings, and squander pensions will meet the judgment they fear and the punishment they deserve.”

Now consider a different crime, committed by the leadership of

General Motors, together with Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, B. F. Phillips Petroleum, and Mac Manufacturing.

In 1936, the five companies formed National City Lines, a holding company that proceeded to buy electric trolley lines and tear up the tracks in cities across the nation. Each time it destroyed a local trolley system, National City would license the rights to operate a new system to a local franchisee, under the stipulation that the system convert to

diesel-powered General Motors buses. By 1949, more than 100 electric transit systems in 45 systems had been torn up and converted. In April of that year, a federal jury convicted GM and the other firms of conspiracy to commit anti-trust violations. But the judge set the fine for each company at $5,000. Seven executives were fined one dollar each. After the conviction, the companies went back to purchasing transit systems, removing electric trolley lines, and replacing them with buses. By 1955, 88 percent of the country’s electric streetcar network was gone. Both the Scott Sullivan case and the National City Lines case fit the traditional definition of crime: laws were broken, the legal system intervened. But the second case suggests that the larger the crime, the more the boundaries between “crime” and “business as usual” begin to

blur. As Atlanta mayor and former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young once said, “Nothing is illegal if 100 businessmen decide to do it.”

"We all have different definitions of right, left, and center, and different notions of what a reasonable position on an issue, or an issue of high enough importance, looks like."

Perhaps it's not just a question of left and right. Any new legislation that does address the fact that news organizations can legally lie to their readers and viewers is not going to help much. They claim it's a first amendment issue and a few other things. And I don't think Bart's idea of what is left or right will keep anyone from banging into a wall, do you?

In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States.

http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/11.html

"Although this kind of thinking, either relativism or constructivism, in the language of philosophy, started on the left, conservatives feel empowered by it, too, and some of them have embraced it with a vengeance, on issues ranging from global warming and evolution to the war in Iraq."

They claim post-modernism and moral relativism are at the root of all our ills, (like life was really great in the "Dark Ages" or Dickensian England).

They have now "embraced it with a vengeance" in their own arguments and rhetoric. But their aim, their goal, is cognitive dissonance, not clarity, not honest recognition that many things cannot be faithfully rendered in just black or white. They use the grey areas as camouflage for their agenda, not as recognition of the more complex aspects of life.

If you haven't seen it, I think you will find Eastwood had this sort of thing in mind. Probably precisely Lynch and Tillman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_Our_Fathers_(film)

How The Media Sent Us To War

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/25/buying-the-war/