Let's Read The News Today, Oh Boy

This blog, and the left in general, can frequently be seen lambasting the mainstream media for its lips' permanently conjoined status to the Pentagon's perpetually leaking sphincter.

But, truth be told, one can't help wonder how quickly the Bush regime would be strung up by its collective ears if Americans would simply turn off the teevee, and pick up a newspaper.

Let's look, for example, at the October 11 edition of the Seattle Times. The Times is known as the more establishment-friendly of Seattle's two major dailies -- owing largely to its bewitching thrall in matters concerning Microsoft and The Boeing Company. But it's an interesting case in that it largely relies on the so-called "agenda-setting" media -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times -- for its national news, picking and choosing between them, and even frequently combining text from different sources into a single article.

So here's what a reader of Saturday's Times would find. (Before we begin our tour, you may want to install an advertising filter onto your computer....)

• The Bush Administration, whose environmental policies -- burning, pillaging, toxifying, polluting, & cetera -- could only evoke a single word (viz., "terrorist"), is at it again. First, in taking up a cause that "involves an interpretation of the Endangered Species Act that deviates radically from the course followed by Republican and Democratic administrations since President Nixon signed the act in 1973," "The Bush administration is proposing far-reaching changes to conservation policies that would allow hunters, circuses and the pet industry to kill, capture and import animals on the brink of extinction in other countries," in order to "feed the gigantic U.S. demand for live animals, skins, parts, and trophies".

Our "Joe Sixpack" newspaper-reader -- who if he can be expected to voice strong opinions about any issue, will be expected to be firecely opposed to environmental depredations -- will next discover that the Bush Administration, in "a reinterpretation of the 1872 Mining Law" "yesterday announced that it would start allowing companies that mine gold, silver, and other precious metals as much public land as they need to help them develop their claims."

• Noted sexist, racist homophobe -- and "staunch drug war advocate" -- Rush Limbaugh has admitted an addiction to pain-killers, and "potentially could face a prison term if he is found to have illegally obtained such painkillers as hydrocodone and OxyContin."

• "President Bush yesterday ordered a crackdown on U.S. travel to Cuba..." Okay, good to know the state is in the business of telling us where we can or can't spend our vacations.

• In a pique of Hitler-ite rage, "Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday capped a White House effort to regain its equilibrium over the Iraq occupation by delivering a blistering rebuttal to critics of the administration's foreign policy and arguing that a consensus-based foreign policy is obsolete." Cheney's tirade was comprised of lie after lie after lie after lie. But how would we know this, having just migrated to print from teevee-land? Because Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus, the story's authors, helpfully annotate each the would-be Fuhrer's utterances with facts contradicting his ridiculous spewing. Would that the Post and the rest of its "Free Press" brethren had taken up this task before the invasion....

Continuing the Iraq theme, we'll find "Shiite Muslims brimming with anti-American fervor." Right. So much for "liberation", and the "Sunni Triangle" theory.

We'll also note that Japan is gearing up to send troops to Iraq, despite "polls showing the Japanese people largely opposed".

• "Federal tax receipts relative to the overall economy have reached their lowest level since Dwight Eisenhower was president, while government spending has climbed to the highest point since Bill Clinton declared the era of big government over..." At least the "tax-and-spend" liberal ideology, whatever its faults, has a leg up on the "tax-break-and-spend" conservative dogma: it doesn't result in $400 billion deficit projections.

• "A Syrian camp bombed by Israeli warplanes this week was an active training base that had been used recently by militant groups, Israeli and U.S. officials said yesterday." How do they know? "Our intelligence," on the strength of "fairly good evidence", "indicates that it was a camp in active use by terrorist organizations." Is there still a soul, anywhere, placing faith in our "fairly good" (AKA "darn good") intelligence? Didn't think so.

To summarise, a casual reading of just one day's mainstream newspaper reveals that the Bush Administration is fucking the environment, fucking Iraq, fucking the economy, fucking Americans' liberties, and threatening to fuck the world at the drop of a dime; while the country's leading talk-show host is exposed as a miserable hypocrite, even the most modest measures of international assistance to the Iraq occupation will meet with great internal opposition, and our "intelligence" is up to its old tricks.

...And Saturday is supposed to be a slow news day!

Posted by Eddie Tews at October 9, 2003 07:02 PM