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Monday, April 16, 2007

Why I Mistrust the Media's Judgment

Although our current media is the only game in town when it comes to hearing that something is going on in the world, I never assume that the details are correct.

No longer content to telling us what is happening, where and when it is happening, and who is involved, professional journalists feel they must immediately provide relevant context. As if they have a clue. What we get instead is the news as the reporter views right and wrong.

What the media chooses to pursue and ignore is quite relevant as Victor Hanson writes:

One could go on with the furor over the misdirected pellets from Dick Cheney’s shotgun, or the clamor for the Rumsfeld resignation. Yet contrast all this hysteria with the slight whimpers surrounding recent controversies over conflicts of interest or lapses in judgment surrounding Richard Armitage, Harry Reid, or Dianne Feinstein. The destruction of federal documents that might well alter history’s consensus by former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was a snore for most journalists.

What, then, is the one common tie that explains all these furious efforts of the media and partisans to go after these present and former Bush-administration officials?

Payback for Iraq.

For most of our journalists, reporting on history's first draft is menial labor when their advanced education and training make them qualified to guide history to its proper destination by choosing what history is remembered.

Which of course explains why the press has no interest in Sandy Berger. What did he do, really, that the press doesn't do every day in large and small ways to banish inconvenient facts that conflict with their judgment?