Again, the U.S. press corps failed miserably to act as the public's watchdog. Indeed, major news outlets, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, played key roles in building a national consensus in support of the Iraq invasion. (Consortiumnews.com was one of the few media voices challenging the case for war, but our part-time under-funded operation had little impact.)
Belated Focus
After the Iraq invasion and the failure to find the promised WMD caches, some progressives finally began focusing on the media crisis.
In 2003, I was approached by some liberal entrepreneurs who were working on starting a national progressive radio network (which would eventually become Air America) and who believed money would finally be available to support serious journalism.
From my years of painful experience, I doubted that they were right, but I also believed that I had no choice but to make another try at building Consortiumnews.com into an organization that could not just speak truth to power, but to do so loudly enough for many Americans to hear. I also had reams of material on the Bush family that I thought should be put together before Election 2004.
So, in April 2004, I quit my six-figure job at Bloomberg News, got to work on Secrecy & Privilege, and resumed Consortiumnews.com on a full-time basis, cashing in my Bloomberg retirement fund to pay the bills.
However, it turned out that my doubts about the depth of the new support for honest journalism were well founded. Significant money didn't materialize. And with most of the U.S. news media still behaving as fawning courtiers, George W. Bush secured a second term.
However, what Consortiumnews.com did achieve in the half decade that followed even with scant resources was a steady construction of a truthful counter-narrative, challenging the vapid conventional wisdom that continues to dominate the mainstream news media in Washington.
We continued to poke holes in dangerous myths from the trust put in Robert Gates as a modern-day wise man to the neocon-concocted tale of the "successful surge" in Iraq. We also expanded our roster of writers to include former CIA analysts who had encountered the same career pressures to slant the truth in their field as journalists had inside the national press corps.
Most Americans also did come to recognize the incompetence and phoniness of George W. Bush and that did contribute to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 but the problem of a corrupted media has not appreciably changed.
As the last decade came to an end, the new Democratic President was struggling against an entrenched status quo in Washington that still embraces Reaganism, both the tough-guy foreign policy and the bias against government intervention on behalf of the common good.
Like Clinton in the 1990s, Obama sought to secure a measure of bipartisanship by turning a blind eye to past Republican crimes. And like Clinton, he failed. Much as occurred in the early phase of the Clinton presidency, the right-wing media incited a pseudo-populist revolt against the new President.
The dangerous political/media dynamic that took hold in the early 1980s continues to dominate the present. Although vast numbers of middle-class jobs disappeared at the end of both Bush presidencies, millions of Americans remain wedded to Reagan's "government-is-the-problem" ideology.
So, as the world enters the fourth decade since Reagan's ascension to power, the critical question remains whether the United States can break away from his right-wing legacy or whether the strongest military power on earth will continue to spiral downward chasing its tail, determined to prove Reagan's anti-government precepts -- and his tough-guy foreign policy -- correct.
At a time when it appears that only effective government intervention can counter the excesses of corporate power and stave off further decline of the American middle class not to mention the planet's environmental degradation the political momentum seems heavily in favor of a comeback by Reaganism in the first congressional elections of the new decade.
The hard lesson that I continue to learn from these preceding decades is that only a well-informed electorate can change this dynamic and only a truly independent media can supply the information that can make a healthy democracy work.
But that reality seems as far away as it has since the (relative) golden age of American journalism in the 1970s.
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