Worldview: Academia & Media
by A Concerned Citizen
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Retired on 31 December 2007
Table of Contents
Academia
Introduction
Academic Freedom
Political Correctness
Middle East Studies
Academic Propaganda
Intellectual Mediocrity
Media
Introduction
Other Articles
Academia
Introduction
25 Dec 06: When I first wrote this Introduction in May, I may have sounded like an echo of FrontPageMag. Even though my political instincts are moderate and somewhat left-of-center, I had resolved to listen to all points of view with an open mind. Then, I was shocked to learn that academia is so far to the left, and, worse, that it suppresses conservative thought and other non-PC views. That would be quite contrary to the purpose of a university. Now I take this with a grain of salt, but I still think that PC (or political correctness) is a genuine flaw of the left. For example, it had impeded honest debate about orthodox Islam, a powerful religious ideology quite contrary to any liberal values whatsoever. All the same, the fiasco in Iraq has soured me on the wisdom of conservative bloggers, and more and more of them seem to be spouting simple-minded rhetoric that does not present a complete picture but rather focuses on egregious cases and partial views. The liberals may be guilty of the same offenses, but the ones I read, e.g. at the Center for American Progress or the New America Foundation, seem rather less aggressive and dyspeptic than their counterparts on the right. There are loud and brash blogs on the left, but they seem to be run by immature and marginal elements, whereas the conservatives who blindly got us mired in Iraq most definitely represent the Republican establishment.
That being said, let us get back to the academic world. Yes, it does seem to be much farther to the left than the general public, but even this may be partly illusory. After 9/11, the public wanted Bush to get the 'bad guys', which was understandable, but many academics, along with the supposedly venal French, warned us that the war in Iraq would become the proverbial quagmire and would do little to stop terrorism. For this, they were excoriated as appeasers and cowards by the blowhards on most of the right-wing blogs. Well, guess what? The academics and the French were right! Perhaps their intentions were not always good, sometimes poisoned by a visceral anti-Americanism, but the fact remains that they were right. Furthermore, the public now agrees with them, with a majority that thinks the war was a mistake, and only 12% who support increasing troops at this point. Today, the universities seem rather less out of line with the American public.
But the war isn't everything. The left-wing academics have been blamed for being bigoted against the Christian religion and against religion in general (except Islam). I thought this was terrible until I learned how true it is that the G.O.P. has become the 'party of Jesus', as discussed here. Now please don't misunderstand me: we are a long way from a theocracy. That would require the elimination of the Democratic Party! Or maybe the confirmation of a few more right-wing Supreme Court justices. Even so, the Republican emphasis on religion, and on Christianity in particular, has left a bad taste in my mouth, and seems quite contrary to the original spirit of the Constitution (regardless of what pious revisionists might say). So maybe the 'radical' academics were right again, or were at least worth listening to.
What I absolutely despise is the anecdotal evidence of immature students disrupting the talks of conservatives. I don't know how common this is, and I am no longer willing to trust the right when they say it is widespread. But when it does happen, it must be punished without hesitation. The same can be said for professors who intimidate students into holding a certain view. Let us hope that these cases are few. A more difficult problem is the alleged paucity of conservative and dissenting voices on the faculty. This seems to be the case, according to polls showing that faculty overwhelmingly vote Democratic. One expects a diversity of views on the faculty, but implementing such a diversity raises two questions. First, how can this be done without violating academic freedom? And second, maybe intelligent and informed people will naturally prefer the Democrats! I know that I do at this time, for the reasons stated above. Nevertheless, it is always a good idea to maintain diversity in the faculty, not only for the different viewpoints, but also because different facts may thus come to light. For example, the left has shown a PC-inspired aversion to studying the actual texts and history of Islam. In this respect, some of the so-called conservatives have provided a valuable contribution, even if their foreign policy was wrong.
I do have a few criticisms of my own regarding 'academia', based on my accumulated impressions while surfing the web. First, the idea of racial quotas seems unfair and contrary to true liberal values, such as nondiscrimination based on race or religion! Second, there does seem to be a spirit of anti-Americanism in certain quarters of the campus. Those foolish people should redirect their ire at specific policymakers. Finally, I am a global warming skeptic, and I am a bit disturbed at how it has become a kind of religion, not only on campuses but among liberals everywhere. I doubt that they know more about the technicalities than I do. And the alleged 'scientific consensus' may be exaggerated.
For the record, here is my original Introduction from May of 2006.
AFTERTHOUGHT: Actually, come to think of it, I would expect professors to pride themselves on their objectivity, so that no student could discern their political views based on attending lectures. And even outside of the classroom, I would expect those political views to be barely visible or altogether concealed. Whatever happened to the word 'professional'? Have universities turned into hothouses of arrested adolescence? Back to Academia & Media Menu
Academic Freedom
Note (25 Dec 06): In this and the next few sections, I simply list articles mostly brought to my attention by FrontPageMag and similar sources. As discussed above, I now take their hysterics with a grain of salt, but I still think they are well worth reading. They may have a valid point, even it they overstate it. I try to present opposing articles, when I find them.
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Political Correctness
Note (19 Feb 06): Again, I must emphasize that my views have become a bit more nuanced since I first started this section. No doubt, something called 'political correctness' exists in certain quarters, where, e.g., Islam cannot be criticized because of 'racism', which is absurd. However, one can easily exaggerate just how far to the left the campuses are. The business and law schools no doubt remain bastions of capitalism; even the relatively apolitical engineers and scientists mostly want career success. The hotbeds of radicalism seem confined to the humanites departments, and some of their 'radicalism' has more than a grain of truth. Not all criticism of American foreign policy is without a substantial basis in fact.
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Middle East Studies
Note (25 Dec 06): Now in the case of Middle Eastern studies, I think that the criticism is much better substantiated than is the general right-wing contempt for academia. Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer seem professional enough to me, though they are of course on Israel's side. I haven't caught them lying, as I have the Palestinian apologists who dissemble about whether the PLO or Hamas wish to exterminate Israel. The problem is that many Middle Eastern departments have been taken over by Muslims or Muslim sympathizers, and I must say that Muslims in general have not been able to form fair and balanced views on Israel, to put it mildly. For them, the whole Israel-Palestianian conflict is nothing but an aggressive struggle; they often fail to appreciate the importance of detached scholarship and of truth independent of politics. That is because Islam itself does not believe in truth independent of religion and politics. Of course, you have your Fouad Ajamis and others, but Kramer's ire at Columbia University, for example, seems justified.
General Criticism
Juan Cole
Apologetics
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Academic Propaganda
Introduction (25 Aug 06): I have found a cache of articles published online by the Social Science Research Council. Having just read in a Martin Kramer article (Jihad 101) how the SSRC gave its 'imprimatur' to the view that 9/11 was all about Israeli 'oppression' of Palestinians, I fully expect these articles to contain many sterling samples of leftist academic propaganda against the US, Israel, the West, and other successful, intelligent entities. If I find other similar literature, I will post that too.
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Intellectual Mediocrity
Introduction (28 Aug 06): This section was prompted by my disbelief upon reading this article by Dennis Dutton on language crimes committed by tenured professors in peer-reviewed journals. And English professors at that! Here is Dutton's first example, taken from what he calls the 'aptly' titled book, The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism:
Yes, that was written by an English professor. The following is by Paul Fry, an English professor at a fairly prestigious university, taken from a book about poetry:
'Absentation' is not even an English word, not to mention that it is ugly and clumsy and altogether unnecessary. How about 'absence' (assuming his basic idea even makes sense)? How could someone who loves poetry do this?
Disgusted, Dutton started an annual Bad Writing Contest (which seems to be discontinued). The rules were simple, among them that 'no translations into English were allowed, and the entries had to be nonironic: We could hardly admit parodies in a field where unintentional self-parody was so rampant.' Here is the winning sentence from 1999, by Judith Butler of Berkeley:
The medieval scholastics were never so ugly! Nor nonsensical.
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Introduction
25 Dec 06: There is a strong link between the media and academia. Hence, it is natural to place them on the same webpage. When I first wrote this Introduction in August of 2006, I was still under the spell of FrontPageMag, as described above. In fact, much of what they say has some truth to it! The BBC is indeed biased to the left, and there does seem to be a growing anti-Israel sentiment on campus and in the left-wing media. However, thanks to the Iraq war fiasco, I now realize that many of the prominent right-wing blogs are too strident and simplistic. They should be read carefully for alternative views and information, but so should their counterparts on the left, and then one must form a wise decision as to where lies the truth. I was somewhat seduced by the democracy crusade that got us into Iraq, but clearly it was a blunder based on ignorance of the social reality on the ground in that unfortunate country, as was Vietnam. All the heated rhetoric about left-wing tyrants of the past, and their 'fellow travelers' in the academy and the press, turned out to be quite irrelevant to this particular war.
Furthermore, there is no doubt that Fox News is every bit as biased as the BBC. So why do I not post more articles critical of Fox News? Because Fox is so clearly a mouthpiece of the Republican party, with overbearing blowhards like Brit Hume and the rest of them, whereas the BBC has a veneer of sophistication and universality. I still turn to the BBC Online everyday when I start surfing for news! They are the best overall global news website, but now I am alerted to their bias and can factor it out. And is the bias really all that pronounced? One reason I sympathize with Israel against the Palestinians is that I have followed the daily news on the BBC for a number of years. Clearly, the Israelis have been reacting to Palestinian and Arab terror, even as reported by the Beeb. So these supposedly pinko Brits can't be that bad. Just be sure to read a variety of sources, as common sense would suggest.
(I notice that this section is growing very slowly. I guess I'm not really all that interested in this topic.)
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Other Articles
Before 2006
2006
2007
[. . .]
Schooled in the protocols of cable news, the Bush administration brilliantly exploited the medium's worship of live events. When I was at MSNBC in 2002/2003, I witnessed producers nearly orgasm at word that the White House would soon be serving up a photo-op or briefing. Upon hearing of these events — called 'pressers' — all else is put on hold to assure that the second the administration event starts, MSNBC and the other news channels are ready to air it live.
[. . .]
When Phil Donahue toughly interviewed big-name guests, MSNBC execs were petrified that the VIPs would be offended and not make return engagements. They'd complain that Phil was ''ering' the guests. 'Access is everything in Washington', Phil later told a reporter. 'If you're the executive producer at one of the big news shows and you piss off Karl Rove, you're not going to get Condi or Rummy or any of those guests who would legitimize your show as a serious, important program.'
[. . .]
Not all 'weapons experts' got it wrong before the Iraq invasion. In the last months of 2002, Scott Ritter told any audience or journalist who would hear him that Iraqi WMD represented no weapons threat to our country. 'Send in the inspectors', urged Ritter, 'don't send in the Marines.' It's telling that in the run-up to war, no American TV network hired any on-air analysts from among the experts who questioned White House WMD claims. None would hire Ritter. Inside MSNBC in 2002, Ritter was the target of a smear that he was receiving covert funds from Saddam Hussein's government. The slur, obviously aimed at reducing his appearances, insinuated that Ritter's views were not genuine and heartfelt, but procured.
[. . .]
TV's big broadcast networks were no more open to critical voices than cable news, as illustrated by FAIR's study of the nightly newscasts on CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS in the week before and the week after Colin Powell's bellicose UN Security Council presentation on Iraqi WMD. Powell's February 2003 speech was built on obvious exaggerations and falsehoods. But nightly news viewers would have been largely clueless. Of the 393 people interviewed about Iraq during those crucial weeks, only three were antiwar advocates. That's a fraction of 1 percent — a nondebate, at a time when polls showed half the country opposing a rush to war. [. . .]
The outburst of media patriotism after the attacks reveals how fragile the barrier is between journalism and propaganda. . . . Fox was the worst, but the rest of the mainstream media was clearly influenced by the perceived need to be 'Americans first and journalists second'. This was manifested less in obviously biased or flawed stories than in subtler ways: the simple failure to investigate Bush administration claims, go outside the magic circle of approved wise men, or in general aggressively question the whole surreal adventure. This failure was even more glaring because the run-up to war took place in slow motion. For nine months or more, everyone knew Bush was determined to attack Iraq, and no one really knew why. Yet the mainstream media was unable to break out of its stupor. At a critical moment, that stupor appeared almost literal.
I'm not saying that there's no place for patriotism, or fellow feeling, in journalism. . . . But when it comes to forward-looking analysis and reporting — as opposed to elegiac coverage — patriotism and groupthink are journalistic poison. Hume's implicit argument that it was 'un-American' to report extensively on civilian casualties was an extreme example. But in newsrooms across the land, thousands of smaller, unnoticed cases of self-censorship or selective reporting were taking place. 9/11 in particular was a sacred taboo that even the most cold-blooded, dispassionate journalists feared to disturb. They'd seen what happened to Susan Sontag, who was crucified for daring to say that the 9/11 attackers were not cowards, that President Bush's tough-talking response was 'robotic', and that America urgently needed to rethink its Middle East policies.
[. . .]
There are a number of reasons for this softening of journalism's backbone. One is economic. The decline of newspapers, the rise of infotainment, and media company owners' insistence on delivering high returns to their shareholders have diminished resources and led to a bottom-line fixation unconducive to aggressive reporting. . . .
Another is the opiating effect of corporate culture: Major media has become increasingly bland and toothless, just like the huge bureaucracies that own it and that are increasingly indistinguishable from each other and from the federal government. . . .
Then there is the Faustian trade-off of 'access' journalism, to which, as the Judith Miller debacle revealed, more and more prominent journalists have succumbed. As Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg told Editor and Publisher in 2003, this is a cardinal journalistic sin. . . . As the war drums beat, the Beltway press bought and bought and bought — before they discovered they'd been sold.
[. . .]
Which leads us to the third and final area where journalism failed in the aftermath of 9/11: ideology. Evaluating why America was attacked required journalists to learn about the history of the Arab/Muslim world — and not just skim one of Bernard Lewis' tendentious articles discounting Arab grievances. Evaluating how dangerous Saddam Hussein really was required knowledge of the contemporary Middle East — not just a quick read of Kenneth Pollack's 'The Threatening Storm', which argued that Saddam posed so great a threat to America that war was necessary. . . .
None of this happened for three closely related reasons. The first was simple ignorance. . . . Second, American society in general has a strongly pro-Israel orientation — one that journalists generally share (or are too intimidated or ignorant to contest) — which inevitably guides their assumptions and beliefs about Arabs, terrorism and the Middle East in general. . . . As Kinsley and I have both argued, for the neoconservative Jews who played a key role in brainstorming the war, it was simply taken as axiomatic that America's interests and Israel's are identical. . . . Finally, the media was unable to deal with the abstract and highly ideological motivations for Bush's war — especially because those motivations, as Paul Wolfowitz notoriously admitted, were never really made clear. . . .
[. . .]
We should note one more reason for the media's Iraq failure: the Bush administration. The mainstream media, especially in its current enfeebled form, is simply not equipped to deal with a regime as secretive, manipulative, vengeful and, not to put too fine a point on it, malignant as the present one. Back to Academia & Media Menu
May 06: An article by George Shadroui sets out the problem. Who could disagree, at least in principle, with David Horowitz' efforts to drive indoctrination, leftist or otherwise, from the classroom? The purpose of an education, as he says, is to teach the student how to think, not what to think. However, I am not sure whether such indoctrination is as widespread as he claims it is, but then I have not yet read his book! What is clear is that American academics, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, if not further to the left of the political spectrum. If quotas can be used to tailor the student body to resemble the general public, then why not apply the same principle to the faculty? Frankly, I could entertain using the political system to redress that balance, which would be a much stronger measure than what Horowitz advocates. Perhaps the sacred cow of tenure needs to be modified or eliminated. It was intended to preserve freedom of inquiry on campus but now seems to be having the opposite effect.
Actually, I wasn't as brainwashed by the sinister right-wing propaganda machine as I thought! :-)
Website: Students for Academic Freedom
George Shadroui: Academia and the Left
Steven M. Warshawsky: Reclaiming Higher Education from the Left
David Horowitz: The Battle for the Bill of Rights
David Horowitz: Missing Diversity On America's Campuses
David Horowitz: The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics
Scot Sherman: David Horowitz' Long March
Kurt Nimmo: The Delusions of David Horowitz [more] [more] [more]
Media Matters: David Horowitz [more] [more]
Graham Larkin: What's Not to Like About the Academic Bill of Rights
Jesse Walker (Reason): Chilling Effects
John Gorenfeld (Salon): Ebert and Atta, partners in crime
The Economist: America's One-Party State
The Guardian: Silence in Class
Paul Krugman: An Academic Question
Daniel Pipes: CAIR's Twisted Stand on Academic Freedom
David Horowitz: Criticizes Michael Berube
David Horowitz: A Watershed Event for Education
Mark Bauerlein: How Academe Shortchanges Conservative Thinking
Heather Mac Donald (City Journal): Harvard's Faustian Bargain
FPM: Political Indoctrination on Campus: Is there a Problem?
William Lind: The Origins of Political Correctness
ACTA: How Many Ward Churchills?
Mary Grabar: Churchill's Riches
Ward Churchill: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
Deborah Frisch: A Psychologist's Defense of Ward Churchill
Alan M. Dershowitz: Hate-America Lies For Kids
Kate Buzicky: The Limits of Liberal Tolerance at Harvard Law School
Heather MacDonald: Don't Fund College Follies
Heather MacDonald: Harvard's Diversity Grovel
George Will: Harvard Hysterics (over Larry Summers)
George Will: Professors of Pretense
Brian C. Anderson: On Campus, Conservatives Talk Back
Mike Adams: Cornel West and Friends
Dennis Prager: What a Fool Believes: Howard Zinn, Pt. 1
Michelle Malkin: UPenn prez rationalizes suicide bomber photo-op
U Penn president Amy Gutmann posing with suicide bomber
Robert Jensen (Alternet): No Thanks to Thanksgiving
Wikipedia: Niall Ferguson: Imperialist at Harvard [website]
Martin Kramer: Terrorism? What Terrorism?! (2001)
Martin Kramer: Congress Probes Middle Eastern Studies (2003)
Anneli Rufus: Berkeley Intifada (2004)
Alyssa A. Lappen: Stanford's Joel Beinin (2004)
Martin Kramer: H.R. 3077: The Education of Alan Dershowitz (2004)
Martin Kramer: Rashid Khalidi smears WINEP (2004)
Tzvi Kahn: Academic Marxist Rock Star Mark LeVine (2005)
Jacob Laskin: U Penn's Terror Apologists (2005)
Inside Higher Ed: War and Peace at Columbia (2005)
Ron Lewenberg: Whitewash at Columbia (2005)
Jon Sanders: Academic Insanity at North Carolina Wesleylan (2005)
Hugh Fitzgerald: Columbia Teaches 'Hate' (2005)
Hugh Fitzgerald: Lisa Anderson: Apologist for Academic Radicalism
Martin Kramer: A Powerful Lobby (2006)
Steve Chapman: When Academic Freedom Leads to Lunacy (2006)
Sunday Times: Secular academic distaste for talk of 'evil-doers' (2006)
Joel Mowbray: John Esposito's Islamic Ties (2006)
Stephen Schwartz: Prof. Natana DeLong-Bas: Wahhabi Apologist (2007)
Steve Clemons: Bollinger gets an A (2007)
Martin Kramer: Juan Cole jogs my MEMRI (2004)
Alexander Joffe: Juan Cole and the Decline of the ME Studies (2005)
Steven Plaut: Old Juan Cole: A Very Sad Soul (2005)
Efraim Karsh: Juan Cole's Bad Blog (2005)
Jonah Goldberg: Critique of Juan Cole (2005) [Cole] [Goldberg] [Cole]
Justin Raimondo: Jonah Goldberg, bottom feeder
David White (Campus Watch): Juan Cole and Yale: The Inside Story
Joel Mowbray (WT): Juan Cole: Hatchet man or scholar? (2006)
Chronicle of Higher Ed: 7 Bloggers Discuss the Case of Juan Cole (2006)
Zachary Lockman: Behind the Battles Over US Middle East Studies
Fred Halliday: Revisiting Ivory Towers on Sand (2004)
Joel Beinin (in Tom Paine): Deflating Middle East Extremism (2006)
Neve Gordon: Scholars share views of post-9/11 academic freedom
Al-Hayat: The (Jewish) Lobby Steps Up its Activity (2006)
SSRC: Terrorism (a collection of articles)
SSRC: The Riots in France (a collection of articles)
SSRC: Recent Books (advertisement page)
This book was instigated by the Harvard Core Curriculum Report in 1978 and was intended to respond to what I took to be an ominous educational reform initiative that, without naming it, would delegitimate the decisive, if spontaneous, disclosure of the complicity of liberal American institutions of higher learning with the state's brutal conduct of the war in Vietnam and the consequent call for opening the university to meet the demands by hitherto marginalized constituencies of American society for enfranchisement.
It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness - rather than the will to power - of its fall into conceptuality.
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Denis Dutton (WSJ): Language Crimes of the Professoriate
Michael McCarthy (Guardian): On convoluted academic language
Richard Monstersky (Chronicle): Impact factor is devouring science
Mark Bauerlein (Emory U): Bad academic writing can be good for you
Donald Kagan (Commentary): As Goes Harvard. . .
The Economist: Poison Ivy (bastions of privilege and hypocrisy)
Camille Paglia: Why I hate Foucault
Galactic Interactions: Astronomer blasts Postmodernism
Chip Morningstar: How To Deconstruct Almost Anything
Cosmic Variance: A defense of sometimes postmodernist Richard Rorty
Richard Dawkins: Postmodernism Disrobed
Columbia Journalism Review: Who owns what?
Tom Gross (NRO): Working for Hezbollah: The BBC and Others
Stuart Taylor Jr. (Slate): Duke players framed by PC NYT
Alan Dershowitz: Guardian vs. Dershowitz
YNet News: BBC admits: We are biased on religion and politics
Telegraph: BBC's commitment to bias is no laughing matter
Daniel Finkelstein (Times of London): Israel Gets a Raw Deal From BBC
Eric Alterman: What Liberal Media?
Don Hazen: How Rupert Murdoch Is Destroying American Journalism
CounterPunch Wire: WMDs: Who Said What When
John Pilger:The BBC And Iraq: Myth and Reality (2003)
Mooney (CJR): Media and Preemptive Attack
Howard Kurtz: The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story
David Corn: Joe Klein is a disgrace and may be nuts (1996)
Steve Rendall: Wrong on Iraq? Not Everyone
John Pilger: The Real First Casualty of War
Jonathan Katz (Chronicle): Full Professor, What's That?
Steve Chapman: The University of Michigan vs. The People
Frontline: What's Happening to the News
Richard Reeves: Investigate How the Press Led Us Into Iraq
Joe Conason: Right-Wingers Have Repented, but The Times Hasn't
Sirota: NY Times Flips the Bird to Normal Americans
FAIR: Iraq and the Media: A Critical Timeline
WHY MEDIA IS ONLY GETTING WORSE
Jeff Cohen, Truthdig, 26 Mar 07
What I found inside cable news was a drunken exuberance for sex, crime and celebrity stories, matched by a grim timidity and fear of offending the powers-that-be — especially if the powers-that-be are conservatives. The biggest fear is of doing anything that could get you, or your network, accused of being liberal. I also found in cable news a passion for following the media pack (sometimes resembling a lynch mob) — whether in pursuit of a sex scandal or war. And a fear of finding yourself alone, asking questions no one else is asking. Cable news is in the business of entertainment, using traditional Hollywood genres to attract viewers: lurid crime drama (O.J., JonBenet, Laci Peterson), sex farce (Clinton/Lewinsky), suspense thriller (Beltway sniper), war (with special theme music and graphics).
WHY THE MEDIA FAILED ON IRAQ
Gary Kamiya, Salon, 10 Apr 07
. . . In fact, the media, especially the mass media, adheres to a whole set of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit codes that govern what it feels it can say. . . . Seen in this light, the mass media is a quasi-official institution, an info-nanny, that is held responsible for maintaining a kind of national consensus. . . . What 'appropriate' means in absolute terms is impossible to define. In practice, however, its meaning is quite clear. It's reflected in a cautious, centrist media that defers to accepted national dogmas and allows itself to shade cautiously into advocacy on issues only when it thinks it has the popular imprimatur to do so.
Truthdig: Bill Moyers probes press about Iraq
PBS: Bill Moyers: Buying the War
Justin Raimondo: Our Captive Media
Truthdig: Bill Moyers Lets Loose on Rupert Murdoch
Robert Spencer: Muzzling Jihad Watch
Greg Mitchell: NYT's Michael Gordon renews his scare propaganda
Antiwar Radio: Greg Mitchell on Michael R. Gordon and the NYT
FAIR: Iraq and the Media: A Critical Timeline
John Pilger: The Unseen Lies: Journalism As Propaganda
Norman Solomon: Thomas Friedman's Deadly Addiction
Justin Raimondo: Mainstream media to blame for Iraq
Justin Raimondo: The War in the Media
NY Observer: Kristol, Krauthammer Are Out of Time