Why do I feel like a giant chunk of milk chocolate with peanuts,

pomegranate with seeds, and raisins...who knows? Nobody.

If it wasn't so sesame street silly...I'd fill up the

scroll page today with chocolate lip kisses. Ah, heh.

Chances are this has probably already been addressed in the comments above, but Glenn, as a consumer of CNN’s product, has no more responsibility to have a background in journalism to pass judgment on what he has just seen on their newscast than a restaurant critic for the NYT would need a degree in the culinary arts or a writer for Motor Trend would need to stand on the Chrysler assembly line in order to write down his/her thoughts on what he/she has just eaten or driven.

Moreover, many of us view Glenn’s take as infinitely more valid for the precise reason that Glenn is viewing these newscasts from a place similar to 99% of CNN’s audience, which is outside of establishment journalistic circles. Logic should dictate that self-evaluations by the establishment media be subject to the same level of skepticism that journalists would be expected to maintain for, say, a Justice Department that insists on investigating its own crimes or crimes of its bosses to the exclusion of outside parties. Glenn has never pretended to be behind the scenes; he is viewing from the standpoint of the general public digesting the news, not those “in the know” feeding it to us.

What Glenn brings to these discussions are strong senses of skepticism and critical analysis, characteristics that should me mandatory for anyone who wants to honestly refer to him/herself as a journalist, honed by an attorney’s focus on detailed support for one’s own position. For those who like to intellectually comfort themselves cheaply and easily by lumping us all in as sycophants and political partisans, these are discussions, that typically go in a lot of different directions and not always Glenn’s.

I’m not going to beat up on John King because, really, this is not at all about King and Glenn is certainly not after him. (Didn’t know much about him before, and the intensity of his response could be as indicative of a bad day as anything else.) Glenn is only using him as the latest example of how the establishment media is no longer serving the public interest, which is no different than how Glenn has dealt with Joe Klein, Howard Kurtz, Chris Matthews and the others. Notice that Glenn hardly mentions King’s name after the email passages, mainly just to show how King’s responses are all-too-typical of the establishment media’s defensiveness and seeming inability to look inward, as well as how the buddy-buddy stuff with personally-favored - whether or not they are also politically-favored - presidential candidates utterly destroys a journalist’s credibility.

When you have an establishment media where some of its more self-reflective members have already admitted personality-based bias against Al Gore, and John Kerry to a lesser extent, and you see Hillary Clinton being assessed in the same manner, Glenn and any other observer has every right to raise these issues. Whether it’s John King or someone else under the microscope that particular day is completely irrelevant.

One thing that struck me about both King’s email and the professor’s comments in here was how they both tried to demean Glenn for not obtaining certain background knowledge of their profession while not demanding the same of themselves in regards to Glenn’s milieu. It is not hard to understand why many see that as arrogance.

Not to go all Prof. Smith here, listing my vaulted background and such, but I've got some experience in news editing and my informed guess would be that King himself had editorial control over his segment. If the interview that aired didn't include any substantive questions, it was probably because that's the way King packaged it. So he's got no one to blame for the lack of substance but himself. And if he purposely left out the hard-hitting questions, then that too speaks of his vapidity. The questions that are either un-asked, or asked but un-aired, have the same result.

-- zeezee

Got it, perfesser?

When you do something badly for over 20 years, you just become more bad at it than a newcomer. King vis-a-vis McCain is like the husband whose wife cheats on him daily, but the more she cheats, the more loving, adoring and affectionate he becomes. The only anger he can generate is aimed at those questioning his adoration for his dishonest, cheating wife.

Assuming for the moment that Professor Smith is who he says he is, I offer the following excerpts from something written by a professor of journalism worthy of the title, as counter-point to Smith's obtuse fulminations in defense of practitioners of corporate journalistism such as John King and his ilk (all words in bold type indicate my emphasis):

"When George Bush began trying to justify the occupation of Iraq by invoking the “lessons” of Vietnam, I had the urge to send him a copy of the new documentary 'War Made Easy' featuring Norman Solomon. That’s hardly surprising -- no doubt we’ve all had the occasional desire to try to educate our president.

"Then as I read and listened to the responses from mainstream pundits -- most of whom missed the real insights to be gained by analyzing the U.S. invasion of Southeast Asia and the relevance of that history to our invasion and occupation of Iraq -- I realized a whole lot of allegedly smart people need to see the film.

"But the real mark of the film’s value is that everyone -- even those of us who think of ourselves as well-informed with a critical framework -- can learn much from Solomon’s analysis in the film and his book by the same name. At a time when it’s more crucial than ever to understand the post-World War II era in which the United States became a permanent warfare state, Solomon’s film and book hone in on one of the key features of that project: The propaganda aimed at us in the United States is as important to that military-industrial project as the guns trained on people in the Third World.

"The goal of that propaganda is to get people to believe a claim that is contradicted by all of history and contemporary experience -- that the objective of the United States in its military interventions around the world has been not to expand and deepen economic domination (which has been the goal of all other empires) but to bring peace, freedom, and democracy to the world. U.S. officials are not the first in world history to assert such noble motives for such inhuman policies (just ask the Brits), but never has that claim been made so relentlessly, with so much help from allegedly independent journalists.

“'War becomes perpetual when it’s used as a rationale for peace,' Solomon says in the film, and then goes on to provide ample evidence of how the justification for perpetual war has been manufactured, packaged, and sold. If it weren’t such serious business, the producers’ collection of sound bites from presidents -- Democrats and Republicans alike, all mouthing some version of “We seek peace” -- would be comical. From Korea through every conflict up to Iraq, the rhetoric is remarkably similar, as are the real aims and the deadly consequences of the policy.

"Solomon’s target is not just the politicians, however, but the journalists who become the vehicle for selling that story. His work reminds us that even when journalists seem to be reporting critically about failed war policies, they almost always implicitly endorse U.S. officials’ underlying claim about the desire for peace and democracy.

"While the film covers all the conflicts in the post-WWII period, it is the Vietnam/Iraq parallels that are most chilling. One of the most crucial to remember -- in defiance of the distorted revisionist history that suggests the U.S. public lost its will to support the Vietnam War because of relentlessly critical news coverage -- is that journalists were largely supportive of the war in the early years. Not until the failures on the battlefield were too obvious to ignore did the media coverage abandon the administrations’ propaganda line.

"The producers of this film have used archival footage brilliantly, and one of the most illustrative clips is of Walter Cronkite in 1965 climbing into a B-57 to go along on a bombing run. In the breathless fashion typical of so much war reporting, Cronkite extols the virtue of the airplane and the thrill of the mission. Viewers see him get off the plane and say to the officer he’s about to interview, “Well, colonel, it’s a great way to go to war.”

"After the Tet Offensive in 1968 Cronkite would declare the war 'mired in stalemate,' and so he’s remembered as a critic of the war. But like most of the press corps he first was enthusiastic about U.S. power, and even in that famous 1968 broadcast he didn’t challenge the basic propaganda story about the so-called Communist threat.

"That segment also reminds us that journalists have long expressed a giddy, almost childlike, fascination with the increasingly high-tech weapons with which these wars have been fought. Journalists, it seems, are always suckers for machines that go fast and blow things up. Solomon suggests that there’s 'a kind of idolatry there. Some might see it as a worship of the gods of metal.' This technology fetish reached unimaginably sick levels in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the news media flooded us with high-tech graphics and retired military officers offering commentary.

"Solomon reminds us that for all the talk about precision weapons, the percentage of deaths that are civilians has climbed steadily from 10 percent in World War I to almost 90 percent in Iraq. He describes how 'an acculturated callousness' to the effects of massive bombardment has built up in our society, facilitated to a large extent by journalists who are more likely to focus on how a weapon works than what it does to victims. One of the film’s most poignant scenes comes when images of those victims are shown over the voice of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld waxing eloquent about the unprecedented humanitarianism of this 'precision' bombing."

Robert Jensen, posted on ZNet, Monthly Review Zine, and MWC News, September 13, 2007.

KR