The next time we walk out cocker spaniel, doberman, roving flea-bitten mutt, or a collie Lassie etc.,...

...take the dog to the curb, scoop the 'you know what--SHHH!...and put it in a brown paper bag. Borrow a Light, and throw the bog of Chihuahua's 'stuff' on the stolen White House? If we are lucky (not the lost dog, named Lucky Strike, because Zeus struck the dog with a flask of heaven's lightening...You Get The Idea. Lucky the unlucky dog had one neo-nut, one nsa ear attached to the Salon, and one left leg amputated. Poor god eat human dog-World, ain't it? ( etc.) No Response.

Krwdawg and m.b.f. are lovely plum blossoms of nice food for thought. no perturb them. What a very comprehensible people some human dawgs and ostriches are....Keep our human heads out of the M.E. sands. Yes.

It might also be beneficial to pull up the studies done that showed the breakdown of beliefs in relation to primary news sources.

If i recall correctly, people getting their news from NPR and PBS were at the high end of the spectrum (only about 20% of so having erroneous belief as compared to the 70% of the general population) for correct beliefs about the relation of Saddam and 9/11 while Fox was at the bottom and the other networks filled in the middle.

And once you see those numbers (I'm admittedly too lazy to look for them at the moment) you can see why PBS and NPR have been a target of the conservative movement ever since Nixon put Bill Moyers on his enemies list (and why Moyers was actually driven off of NOW by the Bush administration.)

Jim Senter was quite correct to question the whole notion of "objective" reporting, and to cite Mark Hertzgaard's book On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, which is arguably the best analytic study of presidential press coverage ever written.

However, the best direct critique of "objective" reporting can probably be found in a different book: Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest, which--though restrained in tone--is a scathing critique of journalism ethics, which finds it fundamentally incapable of dealing with the major ethical challenges of the current era.

Indeed, as an interested, rather than disinterested practice, Iggers argues that it functions more to rationalize and normalize the failings--focusing on conflicts of interests at the level of individual journalists, for example, while ignoring the system conflicts of interest involved at the corporate enterprise level.

This example is only one of the easiest to state and recognize, however. There is much, much more to Iggers' critique than that. Plus it has some excellent historical background as well. It is, in the end, an argument for building on John Dewey's pragrmatist model of a citizen- and question-driven press as opposed to Lippmann's positivist model of an expert- and fact-driven press from the Lippmann-Dewey debates of the 1920s. And all in just 179 pages.

http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/perseus/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0813329523

Glenn makes an important comment about the separation of intents and constraints, in terms of media bias.

Today on Diane Rehm Show on NPR, the weekly news round up covered the USAs scandal. One caller complained about the soft-balls the media has given the Bush administration since 2001. One of the "journalists" responded that it's unfair to say that the press has been pulling punches for the last couple of years - I almost had to stop my car in the middle of the road. It was a particularly ironic response given that the USAs scandal was universally ignored in its early development outside of TPM and the blogosphere, and only caught on in the traditional press once it became impossible to ignore without appearing openly biased.

I'm sure that the journalist speaking honestly believes that they're not "pulling punches". It's simply that the filter of becoming a successful reporter makes it almost impossible for a member of the traditional press to actually recognize a story that isn't pre-approved by establishment figures.

An example is Panamanian ex-President Noriega. Back in the early to mid nineties, he was up for a parole hearing. It appears that a rookie reporter, not having been filtered yet, actually went to the hearing and wrote up a story, which then landed on the back page of the local section of the Miami Herald, and died there. Why is this interesting? Well, it appears that the CIA appeared in force at the hearing to argue for Noriega's early release. He was considered by them a rogue operative that had already paid his price - if I remember correctly, some of the testimony included reports that William Casey, who had died at at that point, considered Noriega his protege. One would think that this should have been a major national story about the real nature of our incursion into Panama, instead of a back-page local story stuffed into the space left-over from the obituaries.

No secret conspiracy, just the nature of the press culture that simply is incapable of recognizing a story that has not been pre-approved; anyone who does not quickly lose that capability and regurgitate the consensus reality will quickly find themselves in a new field of work. That's why we always here the meme of "Conspiracy Theory". All that means is not an approved part of your daily required reality intake.

a beautimous comment. thanks.

longtime reader and admirer. Second or third time poster. For a while now I've noticed bloggers of the more liberal bent citing that 70% statistic as clear evidence of the administration's deception, and the media's compliance in disseminating that deception. Don't get me wrong. I basically agree with you about this administration's mendacity, and I have no problems calling them liars when it comes to the issues of, say, Iraqi nuclear weapons or the link between Saddam and 9/11.

I've always had a different take on the 70%, however, and one which still represents a clear indictment of Bushco. But I don't see that 70% as necessarily being evidence of the administration's success in deliberately misleading the nation. I see it as being a function, principally, of the nation's distraction and common sense. The reason 70% of American thought there was a connection between saddam and 9/11 was because they didn't really have the time to study the issue of who did what -- they had kids they had to get to school, bills to pay, etc -- but full well understood that the administration was hell bent on going to war with Iraq and ousting Saddam. As such, they naturally ASSUMED that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, as that was the only rational for war that made sense. In other words, Bush and Cheney weren't really called upon to lie so bald-facedly. They simply took advantage of the fact that no one would expect the administration to do something as stupid as attack a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. A subtle distinction, but worth noting, and one which lays sliightly less blame at the media's doorstep. The media could have jumped up and down all they wanted. I'm still not sure anyone (with kids) would have believed tha administration would try to pull something so off target.

And now I must put children down for naps...