Glenn Greenwald: How Beltway reporters mislead the country

I have recently started visiting some of the blogs in the blogroll (from a meta standpoint I’ll tell you that while a lot of the places you can visit are the same here as at dK, here they open in a NEW window which is a feature I find highly superior).

One author I find is almost as important as Monday through Thursday with Jon Stewart (who memorably said to Tucker)-

• “It’s not so much that it’s bad, as it’s hurting America.”
• “It’s not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery.”
• “You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.”
• “You know what’s interesting, though? You’re as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.”

and Stephen who said this about all of them, the vacant gape mawed Villagers drooling at the trough of slime that turns them into zombies-

… let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works: the president makes decisions. He’s the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know – fiction!

is Glenn Greenwald at Salon (that’s a zoom link btw, that way you can decide how you want to open it.  That and using a storyonly/Permalink are two courtesy lessons I owe to CSI Bentonville).

Every day he comes up with something that is at least worth looking at and today was no exception-

Exactly like a stenographer in a court proceeding, their only job is to record the words that they hear accurately, not to identify what actually is true. And here is Klein admitting — finally — that this is exactly what he did (although in this case, he wasn’t even a good stenographer since he only wrote down what one side said, not both).

The very idea of a reporter and a major news magazine publishing a piece about a crucial bill that neither the reporter nor any editor has ever even bothered to read is amazing. No blogger that I read regularly would ever think about doing that. But that’s how the Bush administration has been able to depict all of its false statements about Iraq, and its illegal spying on Americans, as some sort of complex, impossible-to-resolve “controversy.” GOP operatives say “X” and reporters write it down, and it would be terribly “partisan” for them to point out that “X” is actually an outright lie.

Had Klein even bothered to read the Democrats’ bill before calling it “well beyond stupid” and passing on lies about it, he would have had a real story. This:

Last week, House Democrats passed a bill that allows the government to eavesdrop on foreigners outside of the U.S., but requires court approval to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens inside the U.S. But GOP operatives/politicians have spent the week telling reporters that the bill does the opposite, falsely claiming that it gives the same rights to Terrorists that it gives to U.S. citizens.

Those are the objective facts. That is actually what happened. Yet Klein’s function — like those of most of his colleagues — isn’t to report what actually happened, so he’ll never say that. And thus, Time has yet again completely misled its readers on a critical political issue by passing on GOP falsehoods as fact, and they are highly unlikely to do anything in the way of alerting their readers to what they did, let alone reporting the real story here: how and why that happened.

Now lots of people have talked about Glenn’s piece- kos, and Atrios, and Jane Hamsher at FDL (Things I Know Today That I Didn’t Know Yesterday), and Booman Why is Joe Klein the Way He Is? (in Orange), and…

I think this is an Imus momement of media accoutablity.  How much buzz does this take to show up on KO or (if we had writers ::sigh::) TDS/TCR?

I think this is the arena that we are most effective in, media criticism.

If these guys are so sensitive to a good badmouthing then that’s what we ought to give them- EACH AND EVERY TIME THEY MISBEHAVE!.

The press is a gang of cruel faggots.  Journalism is not a profession or a trade.  It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

(I)t (is) a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures.  The business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.  There’s also a negative side.

Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.- Stockton

Now you can discuss in detail if you want whether Joe is a misfit or a drunkard or a failure, but MY point is that they’re ALL like this.

Every last Vanity Fair strutting peacock and tut-tuting hen of them.

–Number Nine