There's been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere the past few days about
Jamison Foser's article on the dangers of right wing media bias. And there was a very busy response a couple days ago to
AZnomad's diary about the New York Times article on the latest evidence validating John Kerry's war record- and many of us, myself included, expressed a great deal of anger toward the Times, and the entire mainstream media, for having given the Swift Boat liars any credibility in the first place, when it was always so easy to debunk their bullshit....
And we're all aware that Al Gore's film should not be the newsmaker it is, because the evidence of global warming has been overwhelmingly conclusive for many years, while only the corrupt and incompetent media made it seem controversial. And we all, at various times, express our fury and incredulity at the bias and distortions of people like Russert and Matthews, the WaPo editorial page, etc., etc. And that's why I think it critical that those of us who can go out and buy Eric Boehlert's terrific book, Lapdogs: How The Press Rolled Over For Bush.
Boehlert isn't the first to write a book on right wing media bias, but he is the latest. Mark Hertsgaard's great On Bended Knee: The Press And The Reagan Presidency and Gene Lyons's scathing Fools For Scandal: How The Media Invented Whitewater are both probably out of print. And Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? disappeared much faster than it should have. We can't let the same happen to Boehlert. For obvious reasons, he is not going to be appearing on the major talk shows (even though they did hype Bernard Goldberg's cynical and laughable attempt to prove a right wing media bias), so it is up to us to get this book the publicity it deserves. And that's the only way we are going to create a buzz beyond our own echo chamber about right wing media bias!
It's a terrific read (although he needs a better editor!), and has chapters on the media's complete failures on such subjects as the Swift Boat ratfuckers, Bush's National Guard "service," the Downing Street memo, the pre-war lies, the wartime cheerleading, the attempt to turn PBS into a Republican propaganda outlet, and ABC's The Note- among others.
So, PLEASE- if you're not on a tight budget, and can afford to, run out and buy it! And read it! There are enough of us here to get this onto the bestseller lists!
