In a comment below, Praxxus observes:
I will admittedly be encouraged if people start to see through this, but it is discouraging that we have to rub off the veneer of popularity before they can all see and think straight.Meanwhile, Josh Marshall observes that most of the stories coming out now about the administration's manipulation of pre-war intelligence could just as easily have been written years ago. Why are they coming out now?
They're getting written now because the president's poor poll numbers make him a readier target.It is disheartening to think about how easily intimidated the news media are, and about how difficult it is for reporters to swim against the tide of--well, not public opinion, but the perception of public opinion (a perception fostered by Bush's people and wittingly or unwittingly propagated by the press).
Woodward has taken a great deal of abuse lately (and he deserves all of it, and more), but he and Bernstein took on a president who won 65% of the vote while they were working on their investigation. Maybe that was a fluke, and it was as unlikely then as today. Some things really are different today--corporate consolidation of media ownership, the existence of large-scale partisan media outlets, the increasing sophistication of Republican propaganda techniques. Maybe the press then disliked Nixon as much as they disliked Clinton in 1998, and (in both cases) worked on the unstated belief that the president was unpopular despite all the evidence to the contrary. Whatever the reason for the difference, our heroes in the press (with a very few honorable exceptions) didn't have the guts to report what everybody who was paying attention already knew until Bush dropped below the magic 40% approval line.
Shame on them.
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