Pressabyss

Blowing in the wind, or where did the free press go? About a year ago, Bill Moyers presented a startling report on PBS called "Buying the War." One conclusion drawn from it is that only Knight Ridder and a mere handful of independent journalists remain unencumbered by the venal corporatization of our society to report the facts, m’am, just the facts. The so-called war in Iraq was and is a trumped-up illegal act of military aggression perpetrated by some very disturbed people in our name, in the name of America, for their own fun and profit, certainly not ours.

But are these people really disturbed or simply protecting their own vested interests? Years ago, Eisenhower warned us to watch out for the military industrial complex. Now they seem to own our ass, or at least large portions of the federal budget. We spent years fighting a losing battle in Vietnam, both at home and abroad, until finally the press and the people prevailed, not to mention the Viet Cong. You'd think that would have been a lesson well learned. Even Robert McNamara came clean in "The Fog of War."

Lost in his own fog, however, our current president, and all the king's men, enlisted the press to support an ersatz invasion of another country that had not attacked us but does have a lot of oil. And the rest is already history, as in "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq," Greg Mitchell's new book. For anyone with half a brain, though, everything he reveals in this book seemed obvious or at least probable from the very beginning as a major distraction not only from the pursuit of the terrorists but also from the administration's hidden agenda to enrich themselves and their vested economic interests at the expense of those they were sworn to defend and protect in the first place.

The New York Times, for one, has tried to weasel its way out of this morass by blaming the Defense Department for putting words in their mouths. Well, of course they did; and when these words were in there up to the hilt, all of the debutantes in the mainstream media swallowed them whole like good little socialites. Otherwise, they'd never get invited back to the next party. And, apparently, these socialites will dance with anyone, as long as they've got the right dance card.