Media Matters: Journalism Then and Now

Media Matters has a great piece up, comparing the press of the Nixon era to the one we have now. This is a common theme in many of the books I've read recently (The Republican Noise Machine by David Brock, Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast, Screwed by Thom Hartmann, The Assault on Reason by Al Gore, and more). Curiously, however, whenever the news media is mentioned elsewhere, it is almost always couched in the red-herring "left-wing media bias."
Where are the Woodwards and Bernsteins of today? Read on.

[Excerpt]

When the Monica Lewinsky story broke, the Times and the Post -- like nearly every other news outlet in the country -- dedicated extraordinary resources to covering it. The day after the story broke, the Times and the Post ran a combined total of 19 articles about it, five of them on the front page. Twenty-eight reporters combined to write more than 20,000 words about a "scandal" that boiled down to whether the president told the truth about a consensual relationship that was ruled immaterial to a civil lawsuit that was thrown out of court for being entirely without merit. That's 28 reporters and 20,000 words -- at just two newspapers in just one day.

That relentless wall-to-wall coverage continued unabated for more than a year.

Fast-forward a few years. We have a president who has lied to the country in order to take it to war against a nation that didn't attack us, created a network of secret prisons, embraced torture, held people without trial or access to lawyers or even being charged with anything, used the government to spy on its own citizens, used "signing statements" to declare that he will not follow the very laws he is signing, and presided over an administration that is routinely described as "lawless" and that generally behaves as though the United States Congress has no more authority than the Ridgemont High School student council. Among other transgressions against the truth, the law, the Constitution, and human dignity. [snip]

So, given what the occupants of the nation's most influential newsrooms clearly know -- what they have said and written before -- shouldn't the media be devoting greater coverage to the basic matter of whether or not we still live in a nation of laws?

Read more at: MediaMatters.org