De Commerciele Massamedia 2

In tegenstelling tot Nederland wordt er in de Verenigde Staten het falen van de commerciele massamedia serieus geanalyseerd. Bijvoorbeeld door de onderzoeksjournalist Robert Parry. 'Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.' Truthout heeft een artikel van hem overgenomen, getiteld: 'Iraq: US News Media's Waterloo. For more than three decades, the U.S. news media has been living off - or living down, depending on your perspective - its Watergate-era reputation of helping to unseat a power-abusing President and exposing a raft of other political scandals. But the U.S. media's debacle over Iraq - failing to seriously question George W. Bush's case for invasion and often acting as pro-war cheerleaders as the casualty lists lengthened - has dealt a death blow to that 30-year-old mythology. The bloody spectacle of Iraq has become the Waterloo of Washington's "Watergate press corps," its crushing defeat. Even the nation's preeminent news outlets, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, were sucked into the fiasco, shattering the trust that many Americans had placed in their "free press" as a vital check and balance on Executive power. By contrast, many poorly funded Web sites did a much better job of standing up to the political pressures, showing skepticism and getting the story right. The third anniversary of Bush's Iraq invasion stands as a marker, too, for the slide of the U.S. news media's big-name talking heads into the status of laughingstock, even if they're too vain to know that the derision's about them. Imperial Power. Over the past three years, as the Bush administration has unveiled the United States as an imperial power that plays by its own rules, it has dawned on more and more Americans that the old institutions - the Congress, the courts and the press - that were supposed to protect the Republic had long since crumbled into decay. Yet, because of the lingering Watergate myth, many Americans were most shocked to find that the scrappy, idealistic Washington press corps had evolved into a careerist, courtier news media. Even well-informed Americans were perplexed over how the press had become almost the opposite of its press clippings.' Lees verder:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/031906.html Of: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032106M.shtml