On Valentine's Day, 2003, I and 499,999 strangers marched down the streets of New York City, protesting the upcoming war. Remember that this war was done to get revenge for what happened to us, and we wanted it to be clear that we didn't agree.

I figured that half a million of the eight million residents marching would be important. However, the network news dismissed us. We got a few seconds.

Is it just me or did Bartlett bring up McClellan's "Propaganda Machine" accusations just to taunt Lauer and put the air of complicity out there?

Watching TV is hearing the drunken groupies who are estranged from the better masses of people.

Unreal.

They stagger to a mike and speak sheer nincompoop. Then invite another blockhead nincompoop.

What louses.

History will record as the Final Grade they are Flunks.

A better world sees these "teenagers" and wishes to strangle.

What smirking ill-fools. Give them a kiddie cup to take a whiz.

Worst than drunks. Pathetic. Stooges. And they are sick-funny!

'Um are murderous.

Well, no sh*t!

Sincerely,

The Public

Who knew - I am deeply shocked at these revelations....PUHLEESE

any person with 2 operating brain cells knew that we were being lied to and manipulated. All you had to do was to tap into any alternate news source and there it was. I remember a Harper's magazine article prior to the war where someone who was actually in Iraq said "WHAT???" The Iraqi army can not even afford combat boots ..they are wearing tennis shoes..and this is army is a threat to anybody...I don't think so. All any mainstream news source had to do was put boots on the ground in Iraq and there would have been so many holes in the arguments it would have looked like swiss cheese.

First, we have this:

At the same time, MSNBC fired the only real war opponent it had, Phil Donahue, despite very healthy ratings (the highest of any show on MSNBC, including "Hardball").

Then, we have to justify it with this:

The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

So, we have NBC network executives ending their highest rated show, pulling the plug on the biggest cash cow for the network, in order to avoid the "nightmare" of being seen as "liberal antiwar" and not "waving the flag at every opportunity".

That means, since this was a corporate decision, that network executives were making decisions for MSNBC according to higher level priorities. What might those be? How about corporate parent GE's role in the MIC? If we get that librul, antiwar thing going, we might just sell less war equipment. Let's see now, which is more lucrative for GE? Fighter jet engines or ads for Levitra on Donahue?

This case study should be the poster child for reversing the consolidation of media into larger corporate parents.

[OT--Click my name for ondelette's latest post on torture.]

Boycott them.

If you keep them in business they will sell you more wars.

Revelations such as these are depressing. The media's failure to question the war now seems like a conscious and deliberate choice, which puts it beyond just intellectual laziness.

Can I also say that I hate McClellan, Powell, Greenspan, and those of similar ilk that are all too willing to say now that what the Administration was doing wrong. Cowards. All of them. IF they thought that, the time to speak up was when it was happening, not when you're trying to F*ing peddle your book.

I will not watch NBC news again, after this report. This is unconscionable.

Can I also say that I hate McClellan, Powell, Greenspan, and those of similar ilk that are all too willing to say now that what the Administration was doing wrong. Cowards. All of them. IF they thought that, the time to speak up was when it was happening, not when you're trying to F*ing peddle your book.

I couldn't agree more with this. They deserve no personal credit and much personal scorn for exactly the reason you say. One can say that it does take some courage to do what McClellan did -- he had to have known the intense scorn he would provoke by the right-wing/media two-headed monster. Not everyone would have been willing to do that. But the fact that he did the job he did for so long and waited years to speak out precludes any admiration for him.

Still, their admissions have value and ought to be pointed to and used as evidence. Doing so does not express or imply any admiration for what they've done -- at least not by me.

So David Ignatius says in your update:

In a sense, the media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn't create a debate on our own. And because major news organizations knew the war was coming, we spent a lot of energy in the last three months before the war preparing to cover it.

In this sense, in this usage of the term, "professionalism" has come to mean not that you follow the honored, overt, and implicit rules of your profession.

In Ignatius' sense, "professionalism" means that you copy what other professionals in your field do, and don't think about whether their behavior is appropriate or not.

God save me from other "professionals" who think that aping the worst examples of their successful colleagues counts as "professionalism".

She's the only prominent Democrat who matters.

I was in Spain when the Iraq invasion happened. After months of overwhelmingly jingoistic media coverage here in the US, I was deeply impressed by the complexity of the Spanish media's coverage and how critical they were "allowed" to be. In addition, large political entities, such as city governments, issued anti-war proclamations -- and this was the Coalition of the Willing! On my return, the first thing I heard/saw after clearing customs at JFK was a TV tuned to 24-hour news, on which there was a CNN reporter asking a uniformed soldier holding his toddler daughter, "Tell us what you did to secure little Katie's freedom." Appalling.