Saturday, January 22, 2005

Much has been made of the inaugural address of George W. Bush. It seems intriguing that most of the press should be fawning over every little step, smile and gesture of the presidential entourage while people die elsewhere due to their wilful neglect. An interesting contrast is the op-ed piece, Dancing the War Away by Bob Herbert, January 21, 2005, NYT (free registration required), which does an excellent job of highlighting their remorseless demeanour during the festivities and the extent of their double talk during the past few days.

The media has often been complacent at times when difficult questions should be asked and complicit when conscientious objections should have been raised. Investigative journalism or muckraking as referred to by Theodore Roosevelt, has died many deaths since. In the same way that it felt betrayed after "helping" to get Roosevelt elected, current media has been labelled liberal and been all but excluded from presidential contact and its priveleges. But instead of protesting its exclusion, as the investigative journalists did during Roosevelt's time, media has tried to endear itself to the political powers by all but completely suffocating any critical or dissenting points of view. This form of self-censorship is far more effective than ex-Soviet or Chinese style overt censorship. Of course media refuses to see this because their salaries depend on selling themselves as free of bias. That should be the first reason to question their freedom from it.

posted by Nashib @ 1:22 PM