Deflating pompous gasbags since 2006.

Where Mr. King is right is in his implicit denial of a departure from today's political journalism standards.

And where you are wrong is in the surprise at political journalism 'standards' today - indeed, as if they are new departures.

In London, Fleet Street, the location where most papers were edited and printed is known - among journalists - as the 'Street of Shame.' a journalist is available for the highest bidder, and would be switching horses overnight if necessary!

Fleet Street rid itself of this apt label following the departure of some newsprint media to other locations - basically to escape the printers' Unions and to dislocate and disrupt the printers' joint efforts.

The man who started it was none other than Rupert Murdoch who moved overnight his rag to the South West of London. 'Overnight' was really overnight. When employees arrived in the morning at his Sun newspaper (famous for his 'innovative' Page 3 nude), it was no longer in the Street of Shame...

Mr. Murdoch earned his own label amongst political journalists of the day, through purveyance of smut and superficiality, a label I I shall not repeat here. But the very same journalists who condemned his interference in their work to meet his ultra-Right Wing views, would crawl on four for a job with him to 'write whatever he thinks!'

Such is this dishonorable profession, now portrayed in the miserable reply of Mr. King as an objective intellectual pursuit of the truth, when the only intellectual effort is that related to engineering public opinion and consent.

So, please don't judge Mr. King by the honorable standards of Tom Paine. Ours are no Tom Pains! For, crawl they will, and a mere cellphone call from an executive changes the tone of the planned interview at the drop of a hat, or rather, at the silent noise of pennies that will not be dropped.

Hot button alert:

I have written extensively about military, VA and civilian healthcare systems failures and problems. Your question to McCain includes a misinformed assumption about one of these. Walter Reed is an inpatient military hospital, and its patients include active duty military and their dependents only. The patients in question as reported by Hull and Priest in the WaPo were active duty soldiers who had a need for intensive, acute outpatient rehabilitation care. There is no such level of care in the military healthcare system. Up to this point and this combat operation, those patients would have been discharged from the military and gone to the VA or civilian healthcare facilities and organizations for continued treatment.

Before I hijack this thread, please let me refer you to posts which explain the differences and distinctions in more detail at:

http://universalhealth.wordpress.com/?s=Walter+Reed

I'll be happy to answer questions and to refer you to experts in the field. My email addy is on the About page of this dormant blog. And yes, I did contact every reporter at the WaPo and NYT who reports on this issue, and no one ever reported on any of the points I made. Anne Hull emailed back a one line response that she would keep the info in mind. Whoopee.

Media Research Center Inc. is a conservative media watchdog group run by president and founder Brent Bozell. The Center has a $6 million annual budget and 60 staff members and is funded by larger right-wing foundations (see below)...

Extra!, the magazine of the progressive media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, has criticized the MRC for selective use of evidence--the MRC had complained, for example, that there was more coverage of government death squads in right-wing El Salvador than in left-wing Nicaragua, without mentioning that there were roughly a thousand times more extra-judicial killings in El Salvador. Extra! also characterized the MRC as wanting to force out of the media any opinions that it disagreed with, even tracking the off-screen political comments of actors in a project that the magazine said "bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Red Channels, the McCarthy Era blacklisting journal."

The liberal media watch group Media Matters for America has also repeatedly criticized the MRC, charging that they view the media "through a funhouse mirror that renders everything--even the facts themselves--as manifestations of insidious bias."

Free Market Project Board of Advisers

Bruce Bartlett, Senior Fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis

John Berthoud, President, National Taxpayers Union

Steve Moore, Founder, The Club for Growth

John Drescher, Senior Fellow, The Discovery Institute

Dr. Richard Ebeling, President, Foundation for Economic Education

Dr. Jeffrey Herbener, Chairman, Department of Economics Grove City College

Dr. Felix Livingston, Professor of Economics and Business Flagler College

Dr. Walter E. Williams, Distinguished Professor of Economics George Mason University

Daniel J. Mitchell, McKenna Senior Fellow in Political Economy Heritage Foundation

Dr. Gary Wolfram, Professor of Economics & Political Economy Hillsdale College

Subsidiaries

Business & Media Institute

CNSNews.com

NewsBusters

Parents Television Council

TimesWatch

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Media_Research_Center

Qualifications:

1. Looks good in a suit.

Apply in person at...

I mus-ta' bumped a donkey-arse with a brass tambourine entering a whore house?

I'm feline' a cat bit dirty.

I'll bang a metal brass bell,

and a brass metal dong-dumb-gong.

Ia's say, 'Let's bang a cymbal in unison on a mule arse so that A's woe's can-can-can go away! Who else does feel a bit A's A's ammutual a little bit A's need to feel better?

Wow-Perdition's neocon's. A's a fun-kin' yuck, and bad yuck

bad condition!

An in-law was one of the first CNN newsroom producers when the studio was the fishbowl set in the lobby of the WTC. My relative and I occasionally stood outside and made faces at the announcers (so sorry - serious reporters/anchors) to see if we could distract them off game. I see that it's just as serious now, but that the game playing is just a tad different.

And over at NBC, Brian Williams has his own "very serious Nightly News" blog called the Daily Nightly. I used to pen comments demanding that he disclose conflicts of interest and explain Russert's testimony in the Libby trial about the assumption that all sources are off the record unless otherwise specified. I was soon censored. Just to be fun, I logged on under a sockpuppet name and had one comment posted. So it was my comments that were censored - by the "serious anchor editor."