'Watchdogs,' 'Lapdogs' claim Bush beat media

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.mlive.com/news/grpress/index.ssf?/base/features-0/1151217341216880.xml&coll=6

Sunday, June 25, 2006
By John Freeman
The Grand Rapids Press
Although the American people did not know it, the entire Washington press corps understood that President Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq from the moment he took office. In fact, in a pre-election interview with the Houston Chronicle, Bush admitted he wanted "to be known as a war president."

So it was odd that coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post and many other newspapers during the lead-up to the Iraq war portrayed the president as an agonized leader who was being goaded into battle with a brutal dictator who "intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction," as David Remnick wrote in 2003, "but also to use them."

The story of how the Bush administration cooked up this marketing canard has been told and retold, but a complete picture of how the mainstream media ate it up has finally hit bookshelves. In "Lapdogs," Salon journalist Eric Boehlert details the media context in which it happened, while veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas puts the nature of this rollover in light of history.

Thomas has been working in Washington since the 1940s, when reporters had to run to pay phones to file, so she is no naif when it comes to government spin. A finer term for this art, she says, is "managed news," the earliest (and most brutal) example of which was the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which made it illegal to print anything critical of the president or Congress.

[slor]

1. Thanks for posting nt

[Erika]

2. Helen has institutional knowledge

She's been there, seen it all before.

The light bulbs are slowly coming on in even his ardent supporter's heads.

[madokie]

4. and the good thing about it is when the finally do all hell will break

loose. yes the w fall will be a big one, one like we've never seen before.

[upi402]

3. k/r n-t

[Techno Dog]

5. hmm

This kind of thing makes it seem like we asked for it, or should have known better....

"In fact, in a pre-election interview with the Houston Chronicle, Bush admitted he wanted "to be known as a war president.""


Problem is, no such quote is archived in any article before the 2000 election on the net, and the Chron.com site has every article published since 1996.

Go search that site and you get one result for that quote and it's about Bosnia in 97.

If the American people had heard Bush say that before the election they wouldn't have voted for him IMO.

How many Americans were saying to themselves "Man I'm sick of this peace shit"