The flaccid state of the 4th estate

This morning I'm moving back to politics and current events and I want to look at why we have been and are so deceived by Bush. The main reason Bush gets away with deceiving us is the flaccid state of the fourth estate. Just recently the press has found its backbone and recalled its duty to investigate. They still tend to act as stenographers. Too often they accept the Bush narrative and frame and report within it. We still get bland acceptance when we need skepticism.

I watch the talking heads on TV and read the "wise men" who write newspaper columns. They are chummy with the politicians they write about. They accept the premise and the honesty of the politicians. They miss the point that most of us get.

The Bush administration can still establish story lines as fake as “Mission Accomplished” and get a free pass. To pick just one overarching example: much of the press still takes it as a given that Iraq has a functioning government that might meet political benchmarks (oil law, de-Baathification reform, etc., etc.) that would facilitate an American withdrawal. In reality, the Maliki “government” can’t meet any benchmarks, even if they were enforced, because that government exists only as a fictional White House talking point. As Gen. Barry McCaffrey said last week, this government doesn’t fully control a single province. Its Parliament, now approaching a scheduled summer recess, has passed no major legislation in months. Iraq’s sole recent democratic achievement is to ban the release of civilian casualty figures, lest they challenge White House happy talk about “progress” in Iraq.