Hello again. Thanks for the all the positive response to the video I posted yesterday of my Countdown interview on Thursday concerning the ABC debate travesty.
In that same vein, I thought I would link you to my recent appearance on Jim Lehrer's PBS The NewsHour, when the subject --at least from my point of view -- was poor and/or declining news coverage of Iraq.
What's perhaps most revealing is not so much my criticism, but the defenses offered by the other three media people.
In one sense, I hardly needed to say anything, what they said spoke volumes. But you may note my growing outrage as the segment continued. As I noted, imagine Americans response when the latest round of killing and violence broke out in Iraq. The media had been communicating to them for months that the conflict was pretty much ended.
The link below takes you to a transcript and an easy to access and crystal-clear streaming video.
Here's my closing remark if you don't want to do that:
"People talk about the public's lack of interest these days, but the public often, right or wrong, takes their cues from the media. So if the media puts the stories on page 29 or doesn't run the stories at all, the public may take a cue that Iraq isn't that important anymore. And so I think there's a certain amount of justification going on there.
"We even saw last week, in all the hundreds of stories and hours of network news devoted to the fifth anniversary of the war, you know, assessments were made of everything, fingers were pointed, blame was laid. And we saw very little media self-assessment. And I think that's kind of revealing, also, at the fifth anniversary to have the media not give a tremendously in-depth look at its own performance over these five years."
http://www.pbs.org/...
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Greg Mitchell's new book is So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq. It has been hailed by Daily Kos's own Susan G, Bill Moyers, Glenn Greenwald and others and features a preface by Bruce Springsteen.