A lot of media outlets are now scrutinizing some of the lies told by the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq. Yet the same news organizations are bypassing their own key roles in the marketing of those lies. A case in point is the New York Times. On...
While indictment fever gripped the Washington press corps this month, the president's spin doctor was incapacitated. An ailing Karl Rove could not help the Republican search for a media cure. With temperature rising, the political physician was in no position to cure...
By a twist of political fate, the Oct. 28 deadline for special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to take action on the Plamegate matter is exactly 25 years after the only debate of the presidential race between Ronald Reagan and incumbent Jimmy Carter. How the major media...
More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she's facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on...
When the Bush administration fires off a new round of speechifying about "the war on terror," the U.S. press rarely goes beyond the surface meanings of rhetoric provided by White House scriptwriters. But the president's big speech at the National Endowment for...
Dan Rather caused some ripples the other day when he lamented the state of U.S. news media. The former CBS anchor said "there is a climate of fear running through newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career," according to the...
The New York Times began this week with an editorial that typifies the media mindset of the warfare state. Monday's editorial warns of dire consequences from a growing deficit that has been boosted by tax cuts – in combination with "the pre-Katrina...
"The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula," President George H. W. Bush said of the Gulf War victory in early 1991. He told a gathering of state legislators, "It's a proud day for America – and, by...
Traveling from New York City in late September 2001, on a pre-scheduled book tour, author Joan Didion spoke with audiences in several cities on the West Coast. In the wake of 9/11, she later wrote, "these people to whom I was listening – in San Francisco and...
For President Bush, a classic political question – "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" – must be answered with a resounding "No." In 2001, within days of 9/11, mass media touted Bush as a walking FDR and hailed him as...
