John Walcott is Washington Bureau Chief for the McClatchy Co.

McClatchy, the successor to Knight-Ridder, is now the second-largest newspaper publishing company in the USA.

Here are some of his observations about institutional failure.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/walcott.html

Friday, February 16, 2007
Speech by John Walcott to the World Affairs Council of Hilton Head Island, S.C.
. . . But I think that we're in the mess we're in Iraq - can't win and can't afford to lose - not only because invading Iraq as the administration did, without significant international support and by diverting resources away from the war against al Qaida before that war was won, but also because two other important institutions fell down on the job.

First the Congress. What we hear today, from some Democratic presidential candidates and others, is this: "If I had known then what I know today, I would never have voted to go to war."

My response is this: You should have known then what you know today. It was your job, and no part of your job is more important than a decision to send some of our finest young men and women to war . . . Not only should you have known, congressmen, congresswomen and senators. You could have known.

If you had done your homework, you would have known that many of the real experts in the government, in the CIA, the DIA, the State Department, the uniformed military, the Energy Department and so on had grave doubts about this part or that part of the administration's case for war.

You would have known that the Secretary of Defense and the White House ignored them and relied instead on Iraqi exiles.

You would have known that the administration had no plan to secure Iraq after Saddam Hussein's fall, except for installing one of those exiles, Ahmad Chalabi, as the country's new leader, and that it threw out all the planning that had been done by the State Department and the Central Command.

How do I know that Congress could have known all that? Very simple: We knew it in what was then the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, and we wrote stories about it, over and over again . . .

. . . There was, finally, the fact that most of the most elite news organizations in the country, led by The New York Times and The Washington Post, were seriously, overwhelmingly wrong about Iraq, and that too many others simply followed them, like lemmings, over the cliff . . .

- - John Walcott

Woodward was never, by nature, an adversarial watchdog. More of a big old sleepy dog, but occasionally he does bite some of the hands that feed him.

any more absurd than arguing about the "evil" of do-gooders and the "sickness" of bleeding hearts and the "falsity" of the scientific method.

The hypocrisy is all of a piece.

And the talk about "letting the market decide" about media outlets is just as hypocritical as the talk about Edwards's haircut and makeup without mentioning that, since 1960, all candidates have been coiffed and made-up for TV.

If we had "let the market decide" then there'd be no Fox News Channel, and no AEI, and no Weekly Standard.

There are some decent arguments against the old "fairness" rules, but one won't hear those arguments from shooter242.

First shooter242 says that airing non-hegemonic viewpoints is "censorship", and then he complains about other people being Orwellian.

And so it goes.

Radio stations carrying a single progressive show are threatened that they will lose all their advertising for all their OTHER shows unless they drop the progressive show.

Then, radio station ownership and management typically aren't in a position to fight this, so they drop the progressive show.

And then, right-wing authoritarians stand up and cheer for the "free" market.

The Fox News Channel was created for political reasons. FNC may benefit NewsCorp and the Murdoch family indirectly, through its political influence, but FNC is a non-profit enterprise, so far. Starting FNC cost Murdoch and NewsCorp a ton of money, and they haven't gotten that money back yet.

If right-wing authoritarians truly wanted a "marketplace" of ideas, based solely on who can operate in the black, then they'd be opposed to the right-wing welfare payments to the many right-wing pundits, on FNC and elsewhere, who couldn't otherwise survive in a free market.

The authoritarians pay lip service to "free markets" but they want hegemony.

The UK has the Telegraph and the Mirror. We've got their equivalents, here.

The UK has the Independent and the Guardian/Observer. No equivalent, here.
We need somebody willing to lose $100 million a year on something equivalent.