Thursday, June 23, 2005

Why isn't the Downing Street Memo news?

I find myself reluctantly agreeing with Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist, when yesterday he said, with very reasonable asperity:
...Of course Bush deserves to be impeached. But of course Bush will not be impeached, because impeachment requires a massive federal investigation and an act of Congress and the support of countless senators and representatives, and right now the GOP controls Congress with a little iron penis, and therefore any sort of uprising or scandal or suggestion of punishment gets immediately slammed down or scoffed away or buried under an avalanche of shrugs and yawns and neoconservative smugness. Isn't that right, Mr. Gannon? Mr. DeLay? Abu Ghraib? Gitmo? Saddam? Et al.

BushCo survived the illegal sanctioning of inhumane torture. They survived a gay male prostitute acting as a journalist. They survived Enron and Diebold and the rigging of the first election and they will survive Downing Street simply because all the people who should be on the attack about these atrocities all work for the guys who committed them.

The media have either become part of the deceit apparatus, like Fox News, or they are too fearful to resist the new paradigm of what "news" is.
I am afraid it's true. News is now any fresh steaming pentagon lie, or the white house excreting a press release, or any fortuitous new forest fire of bigotry whose flames can be fanned--currently the anti-gay marriage nonsense, and anti-flag burning hysteria, but whatever new outburst of bigotry might break out, is grist for the Republican media's frenzy mill. Let's face it. We have now, for the most part, a Republican media in this country, or, at best, one neutered by Republicans. How could we fail to realize this, when "news" is Karl Rove burrowing out of the pile of corpses his master's policies have mounded up for us, to howl that democrats are unpatriotic.

"Unbiased" news would then be the act of splitting the difference between Karl Rove and the truth, between the lies and a mild protest against the lies, except that the media by and large are loath to even split the difference evenly, living as they do in fear that Karl Rove will point at them next.

As he will.

Thank God for the blogosphere. The left half of it. And the remaining independent voices in the media like Mr. Morford, who have not been bought or silenced.

No comments: