I think this'll probably help deal with trolls and right-wingdings clogging the letters forum. Fingers crossed, anyway!

they were attired in civilized-looking, albeit Tehran-made, suits.

Ouch! What a snarky little dig. Given that Persian culture (and civilization) long predates Britain's and America's, that's just plain rude. People might argue that because we have sitcoms and drive-thru, we're the paragons of civilization, but there's a big world out there, and lots of history and culture has to be ignored for us to be the cradle of civilization. And they didn't torture the British prisoners, now did they? That can, and likely will, be spun cynically, but if they'd played by our modified rules of "civilized" prisoner-taking (e.g. secret prisons, torture lite), those British marines might've been in a very bad way.

Journalists find any criticisms based on that lack of trust to be "outrageous," because they think they've done nothing to deserve it. They see themselves as trustworthy and solid professionals with a record that merits great respect and faith.

They also see themselves as objective, even when they're not. Are they wondering why fewer people tune into their broadcast news, read their newspapers and magazines? They like to blame the American public for it, but if they did their jobs, covered the tough stories well, maybe more people would pay attention to them. The problem is their fawning obedience to power (while at the same time pretending that they're adversarial and objective).

The Right figured out how to co-opt journalists long ago -- pander to the ones who play ball (e.g., kiss ass) and freeze out the ones who don't. And package news for the journalists, so they can be spoonfed news bits instead of bothering to dig out stories themselves.

Once journalists became meta-celebrities, it was basically over for the profession. Journalists should be feared, not pampered. That's why in Third World dictatorships, journalists end up dead. In the US, they end up as celebrities -- then you don't have to shoot them; you treat them to black tie dinners, instead.

Hard news would sell, if only American journalists would risk it. Gosh, they might piss off official news sources, and then what, maybe have to look into stories themselves.

My point is that it is a bad example for a female leader in a western country to don a garment that is associated with oppression.

Let's hope she wasn't wearing heels, too, or you'll be really incensed.

Here's what should be incensing you: half of Congress isn't female (how "representative" is that?), we lack sensible and ample child care benefits and maternal care (woefully inadequate compared to the other, more progressive First World countries), women don't make the same amount of money as men, and the idea of a female president is actually controversial.

And you're worried about headscarves?? Let's get our own house in order, howsabout?

I've long said that what we've seen with the failure of the press amounts to Watergate in reverse -- that is, instead of the press exposing and revealing presidential wrongdoing, we find that the press shielded, protected, aided and abetted presidential wrongdoing, with predictably rotten consequences for the country.

Certainly the Bush League cynically and mendaciously manipulated everyone in their quest for an endless war as a way to force a consensus on the country (War on Terror, by jingo!), but without the press as the enabler, I don't think the Bushies could have gotten as far as they did. It's a disgrace to the profession.

And maybe that's what happens when journalism becomes an industry -- too much money is being made to take risks. Just as advertisers on network television enjoy a dictatorship of the dollar -- they don't like a show, they pull (or threaten to pull) advertising dollars, and the networks march in step. Similarly, perhaps the mainstream media have become too lucrative an industry to risk challenging coverage of events, worried that they would continue to lose audience if they had a go at the president and his cabal, who were milking 9/11 for political purposes (and let's be very honest: they were -- that's why they, among other things, ramrodded huge tax cuts through a prostrate Congress while running us to war; there's no justification for tax cuts AND war at the same time except getting while the getting's good).

Mr. Kamiya rightly pointed out that Salon was one of the only media critics of the war, and from early on, pointing out that it...

has no corporate owner and is aggressively independent.

So, I think he needs to add "economic" to his list of reasons why the mainstream press blew it. The media industry is about delivering audience to advertisers, not about informing the public, which is really a kind of side benefit (sort of the way a good television show may have some value, but it's invariably secondary to its ability to deliver audience to advertisers -- that's how great shows get cancelled after one season; the goodness of the show is immaterial against the ability to deliver audience to advertisers). I think long ago, corporate media realized it could deliver investor profits without doing the hard work that hard news actually is, and it's run with that ball for decades; 9/11 exposed the weaknesses of this approach.

My hope is that as fewer and fewer people continue to deliver themselves to mainstream media, dwindling their profits further, and it'll force a change in the industry, drive out the fake journalists just chasing hefty paychecks to follow Britney's tribulations, and leave it to people who are actually committed to delivering news.

We were lucky that the Internet existed, because without it, who knows how much worse it could have been; the Net at least let everybody outside the mainstream compare notes and sample news widely, which revealed the very real weaknesses of corporate media.