Hankest:

Sources... Paul

Paul, thanks for that. I disagree, i believe that Glenn (despite his dissembling (lord i love that word)) was claiming that (i better quote here) "distrust of the media has been substantially heightened" due to the lies spread by the media re: to Iraq. I simply asked for a source of that point (well two points actually).

And I proceeded along the same lines that Glenn did--saying that there are more than one way to skin a cat.

You chose to ignore the argument I presented, which indicates you have no rebuttal to it.

So let me repeat it for you:

(1) In the run-up to war with Iraq, the American people expressed continued principled opposition to the direction we were headed. They wanted negotiations rather than war, they wanted inspections rather than war, and they wanted a UN resolution, rather than the US going to war on its own.

Despite all the options they wanted being discarded, they reluctantly came to support the war, because the media presented it as a necessity, related to 9/11 and the war on terrorism. Regardless of what they might say to a pollster in some other context, their support for the Iraq War when the chips were down was a striking indication of trust in the media on that subject at that time. The media excluded anti-war voices and perspectives, and the American people accepted that pronounced bias, went ahead and trusted the media anyway.

(2) Now, four years later, the media continues to argue that Bush is right and the Democrats are wrong. They promote bogus controversies, such as Pelosi's Mideast trip. They frame the battle over the supplemental in Bush's terms. They play along with McCain's bogus Baghdad market photo op. The list goes on and on. But the American people's patience doesn't. Not only has president lost the American people on Iraq--the press has, too.

And the proof is in the pudding. No matter what the people may say they think about the media, their actual response to the media's messaging is a form of primary data that cannot be ignored or denied.

(3) Bonus! This is not an isolated example, by the way. There are all sorts of media examples of media effects that show people trusting the media, regardless of what they tell pollsters. (Negative views of public education, for example, indicate signifcant trust in the media, since most people think their own kid's schools are pretty good. They trust media horror stories they hear about public education, tho, and so the less direct experience they have, the lower opinion they have of public education.) One has to look at specific responses in order to get past general expressions which may be nothing more than expressions of general disgust. (Levels of trust with social institutions generally correlate with one another, tend to go up and down together, and the press is one such institution. Not always, of course, but more often than not.)

By Brian Eno, of course:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_Tiger_Mountain_By_Strategy_%28album%29

Brian Eno (More Dark Than Shark):

"I nearly always work from ideas rather than sounds. Titles. It's that title that just fascinates me. It's fabulous. I mean, I am interested in strategy, and the idea of it. I'm not Maoist or any of that; if anything, I'm anti-Maoist. Strategy interests me because it deals with the interaction of systems, which is what my interest in music is really, and not so much the interaction of sounds."