A line worth remembering

I was reading some stuff today about the YearlyKos Convention in Chicago, and I ran across this insightful observation from blogger Jill Filipovic of Feministe:

"The left wants the media to be accurate, and the right wants the media to be conservative."

Ain't it the truth?

Liberal media?

You mean this liberal media?

So-called liberal media overlook GOP falsehoods

Paul Krugman notes here that even the Washington Post gave Mitt Romney a pass when he wrongly stated earlier this week that the war in Iraq could have been avoided if Saddam Hussein had let in weapons inspectors.

Saddam did, in fact, allow weapons inspectors to enter the country. They didn't find anything, so the Bush administration ordered them out to make way for the U.S. invasion.

Romney's version of events is entirely, provably, scandalously false. But the media mostly have ignored his prevarications in favor of focusing on relatively trivial matters.

So, what's the latest on John Edwards' haircuts? What's Hillary wearing today? Have lightning and thunder interrupted any of Rudy Giuliani's speeches lately?


UPDATE: Here's another take on Romney's lie and how it echoed George W. Bush's fiction on the same subject.

More on the Moyers documentary

(NOTE: This post from last week has been bumped up to give prominence to the exchanges in the comments section, the last few contributions to which were made today. -- The Rascal)

Before you click on this link for a good little essay by Glenn Greenwald about last night's edition of "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS, wherein the media were skewered for swallowing the Bush administration's crapola in the months just prior to the war in Iraq, The Rascal has one observation to share:

One of the best things about Moyers' documentary is that it puts the lie to a popular myth among conservatives about the so-called liberal media. That myth holds that the media, controlled by a snobbishly liberal elite, is inherently inclined to oppose almost anything arising from a conservative Republican presidency.

The truth, as Moyers made clear, is that The New York Times, the Washington Post, the TV networks and the rest of the establishment media were more than eager four and five years ago to support this Republican president in his plans for military adventure in the Middle East. They were more than eager to marginalize, if not denounce, anybody who dared express skepticism about the matter. They were more than eager to play an indispensible role in the administration's calculated efforts to curry public favor for the policy. They were willing, in short, to be played like so many violins.

The lesson to be learned from this is that liberals have no more reason than conservatives to trust the mainstream media. That's why so many of the liberals in the blogosphere, unbeknownst to the conservatives who don't read such stuff, tend to be distrustful of (and sometimes hostile to) the establishment media.

UPDATE: Mark Knoller of CBS News takes issue today with Moyers' characterization of the White House press corps as lapdogs. The comments at the bottom of the piece rightly put Knoller in his place.

Moyers kicks liberal media butts -- big time!

In a 90-minute report on PBS tonight, Bill Moyers delivered an awesome roundhouse punch to the liberal media for its scandalously unquestioning acceptance of the Bush administration's lies during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

It's too bad that every American -- especially every journalist in the country -- didn't see this important documentary. PBS would do well to re-run it a few times over the coming weeks and months.

Moyers didn't plan it this way, but his devastating piece aired on the same day that this NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that most Americans aren't buying the Bush bullshit on the war anymore and are no longer afraid of being labeled unpatriotic by the die-hard hawks and right-wing nut cases.

The poll also shows that most Americans agree with the Democrats on setting a timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

If Bush refuses to sign the war-funding bill, it is he, not the Democrats, who will have betrayed both the troops in Iraq and the American people.

When the media drank W's Kool-Aid

PBS will air a scorching 90-minute documentary tonight in which Bill Moyers shows how the so-called liberal media played lapdog to the Bush administration in the dishonest run-up to the distastrous war in Iraq.

This is counterintuitive, of course, to the stereotype of the media painted by the zanies on the political right. Accordingly, some of them, like this guy and this guy, are soiling themselves in angst over Moyers' report.

Oh, by the way, another phony stereotype peddled by the rightists is that the insistence by Harry Reid and the Democrats in Congress to set a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is somehow out of sync with the thinking of truly patriotic Americans.

But consider, if you will, the opinions of this gang of retired generals.