I want to see my other comments

I know that you are not complaining, but I can only say that it only feels Sisyphean. This is the nature of the battle, to grind it out. They have money, corps of people, and multiple, multiple outlets to lie and obfuscate.

The truth is powerful, and will win out, but it must be kept, somehow, front and center. You do a good job of it.

Kudos.

Maybe his name was put on as one of the authors of that article as a punishment. Or maybe he lost a bet with someone -- perhaps Mr. Rutenberg -- and the loser had to let the winner put words in his mouth. The other possibility -- that Michael Gordon has finally seen the light -- seems unlikely. If you can keep your head stuck somewhere the sun doesn't shine (such as a cloud, for those with tender sensibilities) for this long in the face of being well paid to be a witness to the war, you can keep your head stuck there forever.

Blogs by smart, noisy, energetic people are this century's protest marchers, willing to get out there even when it seems futile, then blessedly attaining a decibel level that simply cannot be ignored.

Keep up the internet shouting while you still can! We'd all be in (a lot more) trouble if not for you. I personally am so fatigued by every day's new lies that I get woozy and want to take a nap, so I'm thankful every day for those who manage not to be worn down and keep up the fight.

Ignore my last posting. It was posted to the wrong Glenn article.

Your prolific and thoughtfully reasoned postings and the equally fine responses to them have provided an excellent discussion. Try as I might, I couldn't find anything worthwhile to add. All of you pretty much kept unreasonable, emotional responses out of the discussion. It is too easy to throw out assumptions and then defend them without listening to other inputs. A lot of listening went on today. I look forward to the quality remaining so high. I hope the discussions of Democrats in the Congress are of even half the quality of the postings here. If anyone has any personal, Democratic congressional or M$M contacts, please provide them this link. They will learn a lot.

Thanks for the further illumination. I consider you an optimistic pessimist, just like me.

Lordy lordy, and I was thinking the media was merely a PR outlet for the powers that bellittle.

I'm not sure whether my comments fill me with optimism, pessimism, or continued historically-adjusted numbness.

I've pretty much consistently made two points: one, the news producer institutions themselves will simply not reform themselves on their own. They have, in my view, few incentives to and many incentives not to consistently practice real journalism and editorial judgment, particularly not with regard to hawkish foreign policy initiatives.

Two, individuals may struggle and occasionally succeed within mainstream news producers which at the time are systematically discouraging real journalism, but only occasionally. Therefore there is still a 100% need for writers, investigators, and broadcasters acting OUTSIDE the major corporate news producer systems, in order to directly or indirectly counter the many shoddy excuses for journalism which regularly flow from those major news producers.

With Glenn's last point I only added a minor corollary: the occasions on which journalists or publications are most vulnerable to a Glenn-generated pressure storm are precisely those who most repeatedly practiced the most rotten excuses for journalism, in which they've actually left themselves vulnerable and open to pressure because they've basically destroyed their valued aura of legitimacy.

Is that a positive or hopeful viewpoint?

Yes, perhaps, in many ways, but not if anyone makes the mistake of thinking that corrections to institutionally bad journalistic practices by major news producers will take hold for any length of time on their own, or that it will be possible any time soon for alternative news producers to divert from continual pressure on those news producers.

At present, for example, should another hawkish foreign policy initiative begin to assemble itself among the powerful -- perhaps an attack on Iran, especially the beloved air attacks of the pre-Iraq II days -- it would seem to me highly probable (though not guaranteed) that once again we'd see a major consensus by the most powerful news producers to weed out real journalism and real challenges to official stories, and a re-resort to the same sorts of media "failures" so rampantly practiced in the lead-up to Iraq War II and Iraq Occupation I.

(Few and far between are the occasions on which the US' major news producers strike a pose strongly against the bombing of brown people somewhere, once a large enough set of the powerful seem to push it. I can't think of one, but perhaps an example of such general opposition exists.)

The plus side is that the alternative media response to that will likely be quicker and stronger than ever before, but once again it will be a struggle against a propagandistic onslaught.

Yes it's good that individuals and many alternative institutions will struggle against that propagandistic onslaught, but someday, somehow, we had better work to systematically and institutionally ensure that propagandistic onslaughts stop being the "norm" for news coverage in our society.

Because it's the same story, over and over again. I mean, it's no longer news. Those of you who are "logical" and "reality-based" and legal-minded are constructing a case for the record, but why? The reality is as plain as the nose on yours and everyone else's [] face. . . .

Let me state the obvious: The media is controlled by corporate interests. Those interests are in sync with those of a greedy, corporatist culture that is epitomized by the worst of our political culture. . . So of course the media supports the war. After all, their companies are making money off it.
— Susie Madrak

Please send the following quotation to Susie and to anyone else who belabors the point that the corruption of the American press and the American government (both branches of Corporate America) is too "obvious" to require repeating:

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
— George Orwell

Presumably, intelligent women are excused.