Monday, July 02, 2007

Will the Press Idiocy Ever Stop?

By Robert Parry
July 2, 2007

If someone submitted an op-ed to The Washington Post that quoted Marie Antoinette saying about starving Parisians “let them eat cake,” the Post’s editors surely would strike the apocryphal quote – and the op-ed author would be lucky to escape with a tongue-lashing about factual sloppiness.

But different rules continue to apply to made-up quotes for Al Gore. In a June 27 op-ed, Post columnist Ruth Marcus couldn’t resist tossing in one of the favorite joke lines of Campaign 2000, a reference to Gore having declared, “I invented the Internet.”

Read on.
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2 comments:

tmb said...

Isn't this just a continuation of "Operation Mockingbird"? These coordinated continuing attacks cannot just be accidental. The problem is that there is no longer a free independent press in the USA - - the only difference between the NYTs and WaPo and Soviet era Pravda is that the Soviets knew that their media was controlled - - most Amerikans thing there is a free and independent "liberal" press. With the exception of people like you and the very missed Gary Webb - - are there really many "investigative journalists" who are allowed to publish stories w/o fear of suppression due to corporatte interests etc. My understanding is the story on Coke dealer/CIA agent Barry Seal was killed after written just before publication at the WaPo by an editor who was Skull & Bones - - correct me if I am wrong. We have a phoney, lying, controlled media - - none of the lies about Gore are "accidental" in my opinion, we are being sold out by phoney "journalists" . . . .

Mon Jul 02, 11:17:00 AM 2007
dearpeter said...

I posted this after Digging your excellent essay on the character assassination of Gore. It bears repeating here:

I went to J-school, and the deepest lesson I learned is that one of the biggest problems with our system is the personal arrogance that journalists apply to their spinning of the news (and this spin must always be there - it is impossible to writie even the tiniest news brief without biasing the situation somehow). The problem is that the journalists go for the sexy line like trout to God Himself's baited hook.

Gore has actual credibility, something his critics can only jawbone about without living it from inside. Gore has been writing books and essays about environmental issues for years, and his writing has been resoundingly applaused by biologists and especially ecologists around the world. He is the first major politician since Thatcher that was trained in science and appears to understand the principles therein. (And we have Thatcher to thank for the fact that we no longer fear the ozone hole quite so much.)

And I never knew Tommy Lee Jones was Gore's roommate. That's pretty cool.

I guess Gore is hated by those who know they are on the guilty side of a major problem. Anyone who isn't worried about the environment by now is beyond the point of being a fu@king idiot.

Mon Jul 02, 03:00:00 PM 2007

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