Scott McClellan's new book is causing the media's heads to explode as well as Bush Co. since they were almost part of his cabinet at the time. Eric Boehlert wrote a very important column on the cold shoulder they gave Ted Kennedy's very important anti-Iraq war speech back in 2002. The one that was ignored. I posted a prime example of the TV pundit class' mentality called "Dan Abrams Wankery from 12/02/02 on Iraq." Read the transcript and vomit. Where's his public apology? I hope to see one soon.
Specifically, back in September 2002, with the Bush administration and much of the Beltway media rushing to embrace war with Iraq, Kennedy delivered a passionate, provocative, and newsworthy speech raising all sorts of doubts about a possible invasion. Unlike today, the political press wasn't very interested in Kennedy or what he had to say about the most pressing issue facing the nation. Back in that media environment, being the voice of American liberals didn't mean much.
That night on NBC's Nightly News, just 32 words from the Kennedy address were excerpted. On ABC's World News Tonight, it was 31 words. And on the CBS Evening News, 40 words. In all three instances, the brief mention of the Kennedy speech was part of a larger report on the looming possibility of war. Meaning, on none of the networks did Kennedy's speech qualify as a stand-alone news even
The Kennedy coverage in the major newspapers wasn't much better. At The Washington Post, Kennedy's newsworthy speech, a clarion call against Bush's pre-emptive war, garnered exactly one sentence -- 36 words total in coverage. Keep in mind, during 2002, the Post published more than 1,000 articles and columns about Iraq, nearly 1 million words. But the Post set aside just 36 words for Kennedy's farsighted war speech...read on
And of course there's : “War Made Easy”: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
War Made Easy reaches into the Orwellian memory hole to expose a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. Narrated by actor and activist Sean Penn, the film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations.
