[Jennifer_SFBA]

I was looking up media bias in the United States. I found the artcle at Wikipedia one of the best for its' historical coverage of the subject.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_media_bias

[Jennifer_SFBA]

The article below shows the effect of disastrous government policy by media default:



Posted 02/25/2007 @ 11:45am
Suppressing News: Déjà Vu

"The assault on a free press ...should be recognized for what it is," wrote New York Times columnist Frank Rich last July, "another desperate ploy by officials trying to hide their own lethal mistakes in the shadows."

While the Bush Administration's assault on free, independent and aggressive media has been unparalleled, US government attempts to suppress information are not new. I was reminded of that essential fact this weekend while reading an obituary of Ronald Hilton, an influential scholar on Latin America who played a central role in The Nation's expose of CIA preparations for the Bay of Pigs.

Obituaries have many purposes. They can celebrate a person's work, accomplishments and contributions. And this one did--noting that Hilton was a courageous man and scholar. But obituaries also serve to set the record straight--and in this case, to issue a mea culpa for Times editors ( living and dead) who regret the paper's decision to accede to Kennedy Administration requests to delay publication (on national security grounds) of its article about the impending, disastrous CIA attack. (There have been other mea culpas: Last year, in an editorial, the Times wrote that "it seems in hindsight that the editors were over-cautious" by not printing what they knew about the invasion.)

The memory of that journalistic failure continues to play a role at the Times. For example, when the Administration vituperatively attacked the paper last year--even threatening legal action--for publishing an important investigative article on banking records and terrorism, executive editor Bill Keller's open letter explaining the decision to publish made explicit reference to the Times's handling of the Bay of Pigs story. "Our biggest failures," Keller wrote, "have generally been when we failed to dig deep enough or to report fully enough. After the Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco."

What is little known is the role The Nation and Ronald Hilton--"a fiercely independent and intellectually tireless scholar," as the Times obituary rightly describes him --played in this story. In November 1960, The Nation published the first article on preparations being made for what would become the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to Carey McWilliams, The Nation's editor at the time, "Ronald Hilton, director of Stanford University's Institute of Hispanic-American Studies had just returned from Guatemala with reports that it was common knowledge --indeed, it had been reported in La Hora, a leading newspaper, on October 30--that the CIA was training a guerrilla force at a secret base for an early invasion of Cuba." McWilliams promptly got in touch with Hilton, who confirmed details, and agreed that he could be quoted. The magazine then published an article setting forth the facts Hilton had given it, including the location of the base near the mountain town of Retalhulea. If the reports were true, McWilliams wrote, "then public pressure should be brought to bear upon the administration to abandon this dangerous and hare-brained project." In the meantime, he added, the facts should be checked out immediately "by all US news media with correspondents in Guatemala." Although a special press release was prepared--to which copies of the article were attached--the wire services ignored the story and only one or two papers mentioned it.

However, The Nation's article was then called to the attention of a New York Times editor, who assigned Times reporter Paul Kennedy to do a story. Kennedy filed an article in January 1961 covering similar ground to The Nation's. But it was the Tad Szulc article in the Times--which ran only a week before the invasion in April 1961--that Kennedy called the Times's publisher about. The New York Times yielded to the President's demand that the story be reduced in prominence and detail.

According to McWilliams's memoirs (and the Columbia University forum on "The Press and the Bay of Pigs" of fall 1967), a week or so after the Bay of Pigs fiasco a group of press executives met with President Kennedy at the White House. "At this session," McWilliams recounts, "the President complained of premature disclosure of security information in the press and cited Paul Kennedy's story in the New York Times as a case in point. The New York Times' Turner Catledge then reminded Kennedy that reports about the base had previously appeared in the Guatemalan newspaper La Hora and The Nation."

The President reportedly turned to Catledge and said, "If you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake." More than a year later, Kennedy told the New York Times's Orvil Dryfoos, "I wish you had run everything on Cuba.... I am just sorry you didn't tell it at the time."

To his credit, top Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. also later said that he wished the Times had run its stories so that the whole catastrophe would have been avoided.

As McWilliams notes, "Kennedy was correct: timely disclosure of the facts might have prevented what was truly a 'colossal mistake'."

It is thanks to Ronald Hilton, an independent and fearless scholar, that The Nation first alerted a country to what was being done, illegally, in its name.

Never has the need for a free and independent press been greater. Never has the need for the media to act as a watchdog on government abuse and wrongdoing--and as an effective counter to still excessive executive power--been greater.

[MAGI]

..................."And the Bushevik Band" plays "On"

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorials/128

"And the Bushevik Band Played On

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 04/03/2007 - 7:53am. Editorials

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
In case you didn’t notice, Alberto Gonzales is still Attorney General (although that may change soon, with the even more unctuous and repellent Orrin Hatch possibly replacing him) – and those political hacks who were "temporarily" appointed as partisan U.S. Prosecutors are going to do their dirty work unimpeded.

It’s like a nightmare without end.

No matter how much the evidence piles up, the Bushevik crime family still runs America – and George and Dick are left to litter the airwaves with their threats of the Democrats abandoning our troops "in harm’s way." But, of course, we all know our troops are needlessly "in harm’s way" because George and Dick put them there with insufficient resources – and a game plan that was dead on arrival -- for oh so many years.

Nothing could symbolize the excess of a morally decaying empire that cannot stop its suicidal journey than the loathsome White House Correspondents Dinner this year. It was the same group of incestuous politicians, lobbyists and D.C. mainstream media transcriptionists who yucked it up when Bush looked for non-existent WMDs under a dinner table, as our GIs were being blown to bits in Iraq.

It was the same group of decadent elitists who gave Stephen Colbert the cold shoulder last year when he dared to pierce the bubble of sycophantic excess with his finely barbed truth.

So this past week, the White House Correspondents Dinner attendees laughed uproariously when some mediocre comedians invited Karl Rove up to do a corrupt white man’s rap. (As usual, Jon Stewart has the definitive take on Rove’s tasteless jailbird performance: "Let’s say Jeffrey Dahmer came to your Bar Mitzvah and turned out to be a great dancer. He’s still Jeffrey Dahmer.")

The descent of our executive branch and media lackeys into a pit of mad excess has even brought right wing critics out of the closet, such as Vic Gold, a conservative hit man who goes back to Barry Goldwater. In a scathing forthcoming book on Bush and Cheney, Gold notes:

"For all the Rove-built facade of his being a 'strong' chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out of touch president in modern times," Gold writes. "Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots."

Gold is even more withering in his observations of Cheney. "A vice president in control is bad enough. Worse yet is a vice president out of control."

For Gold, Cheney brings to mind the adage of Swiss writer Madame de Stael, who wrote, "Men do not change, they unmask themselves." Cheney has a deep streak of paranoia and megalomania, Gold suggests -- but he says he did not see it at first.

In the last few months, we have finally seen on public record the corruption, failure, mendacity and irresponsibility of the Bush Administration. And the faucet is just getting turned on.
But like an orchestra that has the stage surrounded with armed guards, this band refuses to stop playing.

The only people left who are dancing to their tune are the masters of industry and a sycophantic D.C. press corps, who receive their salaries from those same corporations.

The Bushevik band ceaselessly blares away. No one can seem to end its hymn to death, greed, empire, and utter bumbling incompetence.

We are forced to be witnesses to the tittering of the ruling class -- Busheviks, D.C. media, and corporate barons – as the Titanic sinks of its own hubris and unrestrained egotism, while Karl Rove, a man who should be serving consecutive life sentences, performs a shameful pudgy white man’s rap.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

Technorati Tags: Editorials Bush Cheney Rove Rap"

[Wafflepudding]

The media in America, and in other countries has always served its owners or controllers. It would have been any ancient dictator's wet dream: Control the media, control the mind. I don't think we can have a real democracy until this problem is solved.