Who to believe?

While scanning the editorial pages this morning I really found nothing worth commenting on. The New York Time has a piece by that delusional fat head Thomas Friedman who in spite of the fact he has consistently been wrong still considers himself a "mid east expert". And then there is Maureen Dowd, I don't know if she's drinking too much or I'm not drinking enough but even when she right her columns are rarely worth a second glance. I don't even remember what was in the Washington Post so it must not have been much. I cruised over to the Christian Science Monitor and found this piece from Daniel Schorr, about the last guy left from the "Liberal Media", and he talks about the media.

Washington these days feels a little like Moscow in Soviet times when the government routinely dispensed information to the public and the public routinely didn't believe it. The two main newspapers were the Communist Party organ, Pravda, (Truth) and the Soviet government organ, Izvestiya (News). People used to say, "There is no Izvestiya in Pravda and no Pravda in Izvestiya."

Sounds familiar doesn't it? Both the "Liberal" New York Times and Washington Post played a big part in pushing the administrations lies in the run up to the war. The "reporting" of Elisabeth Bumiller leading up to the war is even more unforgivable than the lies of Dr. Rice and Dick Cheney and like Rice and Cheney she still has a job. There is no truth in the news indeed.

For three years our leaders told us that Iraq for sure had weapons of mass destruction ... well, pretty sure ... well, maybe. One war later, after scouring the countryside, the government admits that there weren't any such weapons. If President Bush were to go on TV one of these days and say that Iran has developed a nuclear bomb, requiring American action, who would believe him?

On a less momentous scale, who can believe TV news reports when they may turn out to be government-financed videos? Have you ever seen the report on the drug benefits of the Bush Medicare act that ran on 40 local TV stations, complete with the "out-cue": "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting"? The Department of Health and Human Services paid her to play the role of reporter. Or, did you see the report on the antidrug campaign produced by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, narrated by nonjournalist Mike Morris?

Or, more recently, the TV and newspaper comments of Armstrong Williams, praising the Bush No Child Left Behind education act, bought with $240,000 of Education Department money?

There is only one word for it propaganda. The tool of dictatorships and police states everywhere and now in Newspapers and on TV stations here in "the land of the free".

Appropriation bills often contain a prohibition on the use of taxpayer money for government propaganda. That has certainly been violated many times. Would it be too much to require that these pseudo-news reports at least reveal the source of their funding? If people knew it came from the government, they might not believe it.

The people of the old Soviet Union had the sense to know it was lies and propaganda, I'm afraid the same can't be said for the majority of the citizens of this United States.