Even as it slips into certain oblivion, swept away by the undercurrents of financial obsolescence, long-term strategic negligence and societal change, the mainstream media continues its droning about the legal rights of America’s enemies, the evil intentions of the George Bush presidency and still, unconscionably, denies the threat to our way of life posed by radical Islamic jihadists, a.k.a., terrorists.
I don’t know what is diminishing more rapidly, the media’s credibility or its relevance.
A recent example is a lengthy profile in the May 10, 2009, Chicago Tribune Magazine. Like the Sunday newspaper into which it’s inserted weekly, the Trib magazine is a flimsy imitation of meaty, compelling Sunday journalism of a nearly forgotten era. In the latest Trib Mag, the cover story is heralded by an ominous black-and-white photograph of the frail hands of a faceless prisoner, accompanied by a grim headline, The Guantanamo labyrinth.
As expected, the inside piece is thousands upon thousands of words of condemnation of the Bush Administration, and apologies for the United States of America, masquerading as a “profile” of a “courageous lawyer” from Chicago, Candace Gorman. Thirteen paragraphs set up the deliberately (I suspect) buried, and highly flawed, premise of the piece by Tom Hundley.
“In the months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the highest-ranking officials in the Bush administration … met in the White House and quietly agreed to override some of the basic provisions of the U.S. Constitution that protect individual rights. They also decided to disregard the Geneva Conventions and to sanction the use of torture …”.