Linkmeister

This is objectivity?

Here's Billmon on old media and the way it's covering the midterm campaign, particularly the ads:

The way the media is currently handling the GOP's Swiftboat extravaganza is a textbook example of how the conventions of journalistic "objectivity" have become the enemies of truth, not its allies. It shows why so many on the left are so angry even with "responsible," non-Foxified news organizations: because they insist on describing a moral equivalence that factually doesn't exist -- and which many, if not most, reporters know does not exist.

[snip]

. . .most journalists, most of the time, continue to flee from the truth: that the GOP machine will use every totalitarian propaganda trick in the book, if need be, to keep all three branches of the federal government in its grip. Or, at a minimum, that the men at the top -- Rove, Mehlman and, of course, Junior -- show no signs of having any limits on their willingness to use such techniques.

[snip]

But when Mark Halperin [of ABC News] promises Bill O'Reilly he will feel his pain, or the CBS Evening News gives every conservative nut job in America a spot on "Free Speech," or NBC refuses to accept an ad for the Dixie Chicks documentary because it [the ad] disrepects Shrub, or Time puts Ann Coulter on the cover, I think they're making economic statements as much as journalistic ones.

You may or may not know that Billmon is a former journalist himself. (He's got links for those statements in that last paragraph which support his points.) As such, he knows how the sausage is made. This essay is disturbing, distressing, and hopefully way out of whack. If he's right, the people of this country will soon no longer be able to depend on a free press to discover the wrongs our government has done/is doing in our name.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Linkmeister at October 28, 2006 12:01 AM | TrackBack