After seeing the fuss that Jon Stewart raised with his "feud" with Jim Cramer, this columnist fully expected that the criticism of the MSNBC's reporter had precipitated a class action suit against MSNBC and Cramer from folks whose 401K accounts had been pulverized by the slump in the price of stocks.
That prompted us to wonder about the merits of a class action suite based on the journalism presented in other mainstream media.
We assembled what little we know about the topic and did some fact checking to enlarge our understanding of the topic.
It seemed natural that the basic questions would have to be:
1. Did the media aid and abet the President in any of the frauds he perpetrated on the citizens of the United States?
2. Did the actions of the President and any possible assistance rendered by the media cause any damage to the citizens?
3. Were the answers to the first two questions enough to provide a basis for a class action suit against the two leading and most respected newspapers in the United States?
Could it be that the journalism in the New York Times and the Washington Post was so poorly done during the Bush terms in office, that those two publications could actually be brought to court in a class action suit for their complicity in the Bush program of wars, political deceit, and bailouts?
Journalists who visited the "Bush Ranch" at the beginning of George W. Bush's campaign to win the Republican Party's 2000 nomination to be the Presidential candidate knew from the beginning that the Bush ranch was just a phony Hollywood set to portray a fictional character who was supposed to be a combination of "governor and gentleman rancher." According to recent reports seen recently on-line at that time: the ranch did not have any crops, livestock, or many hired hands. They did not report the deception and thus showed Bush a propensity for helping him propagate his deceptions.
Reasonably intelligent people (the implication is usually given that journalist qualify to be included in that group) could see that the reasons for an Invasion of Iraq were very weak and questionable but those two leading newspapers didn't raise any objections for the voters to see that Bush was suspending rational decision making and pursuing a personal agenda.
Could an adult of normal intelligence tell that the spin stampede proceeding the Invasion of Iraq was fraudulent and that perpetuating the lies was equal to being an accessory? Did any news media do a sidebar story on the manufacturing of those aluminum tubes? Who made them? What precautions were taken to make sure that they weren't sold to armature atomic bomb makers? Could just anybody buy one? Since there were destined to be so historic, why weren't duplicates sold on e-bay? Why did newspapers ignore these important side-bar stories?
Why, when preparations were being made to invade Iraq, didn't any mainstream media do a sidebar story examining what policies concerning invasions which had been established (by the U. S. prosecutor) at Nuremberg? There was plenty of time to do such a story since the run-up to the invasion took months. Surely a reporter could have been assigned to do a background report on invasions per se and what were the international policies and presidents that were already established?
When Howard Dean (supposedly) went "nuts," why did no one in the press question the lack of journalistic principles that accompanied the flood of stories advancing that point of view without any known mental health experts giving their expert opinion on the (supposed) "meltdown"?
Don't journalism professors teach the student that they must have attribution for such a judgment call? Did any mainstream media go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist and ask for an expert opinion on what had happened, or did they just (to please a Republican) say that Dean had suffered a meltdown? Did the ruse work? Was the front-runner, who wasn't the DEmocratic candidat whom the Republicans were prepared for, suddenly replaced by a fellow who had precipitated battle plans that involved legal maneuvers (such as the incorporation of a swift boat veterans for truth organization) that were already in place? Were the two newspapers complicit in this dastardly subversion of the democratic process?
[A slight digression with an analogy. It is as if the manager of the Boston baseball team told the reporters that Derek Jeter was unfit to play in an upcoming weekend series of baseball games and the newspapers, in turn, convinced the commissioner of baseball to put Jeter on the inactive sick list for the weekend. Then Boston won the three games, and that helped propel them into the World Series. Boston fans would be delighted and Yankee fans would resort to the Bronx cheer.]
Did news organizations take an active roll in helping George W. Bush and the Republicans manage the news? Was Dan Rather railroaded out of job? Did CBS willingly manage news and get Dan Rather fired as a means of helping the Republicans wield vindictive revenge? On-line sources indicate that CBS did favors for people who didn't want the story questioning Bush's service in the Air National Guard to get out. They also helped confuse people into thinking that tainted evidence which may have been planted to contaminate the topic, was the same as proof that President Bush had served his time in the Air National Guard unit honorably.
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