June 24, 2006
(Submitted by a reader)

The mainstream media is -- as usual -- letting the Bush Administration lead it around by its nose.

You'd have to look hard in any mainstream paper, or on any mainstream news program, to know that an official State of Emergency has been declared in Iraq. What does that mean?

It means that the fighting, blood-letting and death has gotten so bad that American GIs are battling the resistance right outside the Green Zone. It means that never-ending talk of the "last throes of the insurgency" are, once again, shown to be lies by the reality on the ground.

But the mainstream media doesn't make news placement or reporting judgments based on reality. It makes them based on what the White House claims is important.

So, we have the farce of continued front-page reporting on a bunch of bumbling terrorist "wannabes" -- who were as effective at terroism as the Bush Administration is at "anti-terrorism," which is to say that they were amateurs and incompetents.

And we have Dick Cheney declaring yesterday, in BuzzFlash's hometown of Chicago, that progress is being made in Iraq on the very day that a State of Emergency was declared because the country has spiraled into chaos and death. The resistance is at the front door of the Green Zone, for Christ's sake!

We remind BuzzFlash readers, yet again, that there is no media around without a bias (and that certainly includes BuzzFlash). News editors are among the most biased people in the world. Why? Because they decide what is newsworthy, how to slant it, and what goes on the front page. These are all, basically, editorial judgments.

So when the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune -- among others -- are preoccupied with the politically enhanced Miami "scent" thrown out by the White House, instead of the really significant story about the Iraq War imploding, the news editors of these and other mainstream publications -- and television and radio news editors -- are making an editorial judgment for sure.

They are saying that despite the Bush Administration's endlessly optimistic and disproven rhetoric on the situation in Iraq improving and its relationship to "the war on terror," the coverage of a politically-timed raid on a gang of fools in Miami is more important than a State of Emergency in Iraq.

The "State of Emergency" that was declared in Iraq should be the front-page headline on every paper in the nation, but it's not.

Why?

Because the mainstream media takes its cues from the PR operation run by Rove, not from reality.

That makes all its White House coverage closer to PR than journalism.

America is ill-served by such propaganda for the Bush Administration.

It is all the more a betrayal considering that our national security is at risk -- and the mainstream media enables the partisan Bush farce masquerading as a "war on terrorism."

Message to the MSM: there is a State of Emergency in Iraq. Unless Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld bomb the Iraqi population off the map, it's going to keep happening.

Because we are no longer "liberating" Iraq; we are occupying it.

And just as Bush said that the Hungarians rose up against the Soviets, the Iraqis are rising up against us.

Our GIs deserve better than to be caught in the crossfire.