I'm hijacking Glenn Greenwald

and am going to demand he become president....or an owner of a really big newspaper...or something. Listen to him teach the mainstream media how to fucking do their job:

"But in general, journalists are willing to engage in this sort of meaningful reporting only when doing so is completely uncontroversial and risk-free, usually because the person whose statements are labelled false is universally reviled. National journalists virtually never subject statements from government officials to this sort of scrutiny, and virtually never label such statements as "fiction," or point out that they are contradicted by all available evidence, even when that is plainly true. That, of course, is why government officials lie with impunity -- because they know that journalists will not report that they are lying.

All of this is the by-product of the well-documented and much-discussed journalistic myth that "objectivity" requires mindless recitation of both sides's claims, and that it is improper and "biased" to take sides. But as the Times article above documents, objectivity and meaningful journalism often requires taking sides, particularly where one side is making objectively false statements.

Journalists are not the only ones laboring under this misconception. In response to my post yesterday regarding the adversarial function which a healthy press performs, several Bush followers equated a belief that the press ought to be "adversarial" to the government with a desire for "agenda journalism" (Bush followers have a handy cliche for every issue), i.e., with a belief that journalists should be "partisan" by siding with one side of a political debate over another.

That just isn't what "adversarial" means. An adversarial press does not mean that the media automatically and reflexively contradicts what the Government says or does. That is called being a mindless "contrarian," not "adversarial."

An adversarial process is designed to uncover deceit and falsehood by ensuring that claims and arguments are subjected to meaningful scrutiny by some opposing force. An adversarial press means that it views its function as a watchdog over the Government, as a check on its power. It fulfills that function by viewing Government statements and actions skeptically and with the intent to scrutinize them and determine their truth, rather than mindlessly convey what the Government asserts. It means that there is a difference between a free press and Pravda.

The media abdicates its function, and becomes a propaganda arm of the government, when it simply repeats verifiably false Government claims without pointing out, as the Times did with respect to holocaust denial arguments, that the statements are false and objectively contradicted by clear evidence. And our media does that all the time."


Maybe it's all that logic and intelligence that is making me lightheaded....