This post by Glen Greenwald really illustrates the very best of the blogosphere and neatly shows the revolution in news coverage that the rise of bloggers has wrought. The chronology is really telling. Mara Liason goes on Fox News Sunday and makes several statements about Obama's plan to leave Iraq, and emphatically juxtaposes the Obama position with what the "American People" feel about leaving Iraq.
HUME: But is [Obama] on the verge of changing on his long-stated promise that says, "The mission is to get out and I'll have them all out, all the forces out, in 16 months?"
LIASSON: I think the 16 months -- he is trying to get himself out of that box. Look, Samantha Power got in a lot of trouble . . . where she said, "Well, of course he's not going to just stick to some campaign promise of 16 months. He's going to look at the facts on the ground."
Well, that's what the American people want a commander in chief to do. That might not be what his left-wing base does. The question for Obama now is what kind of Iraq does he want to leave behind.
In the old days of a few years ago, that's where punditocracy ended. Mara Liasson is an expert, well informed, and her statement would have stood as fact. Brit Hume, frow burrowed, would nod approvingly at this wisdom, comfortable in the fact that the radical left-wing base of the Democratic Party was being counterbalanced by the power of the national media.
Except that it is all bullshit.
As Greenwald points out, in near real time, Obama's position clearly reflects the desires of the
majority of the American people, and Liasson's assertion is pure, unadulterated crap.
How much clearer could that be? The truth is exactly the opposite of what Liasson said. Americans want to withdraw from Iraq in accordance with Obama's timetable (if not faster) regardless of circumstances "on the ground" -- not conditioned on those circumstances. But because that's not the view Liasson and her establishment colleagues embrace, they just lie and claim that the majority view is the one held only by the "left-wing" fringe, while their own actually fringe view is the one embraced by "the American people" and thus defines the "Center."
As Greenwald concludes:
The fact that Mara Liasson feels perfectly comfortable going on television and baldly uttering a clear-cut falsehood -- that only "the left-wing base" favors unconditional withdrawal while "the American people" only want to leave Iraq when "facts on the ground" allow it -- demonstrates how pervasive this deceit is. She likely isn't even aware that what she's saying is false. The establishment class is so self-absorbed, so inculcated with faith in their own wisdom, that they automatically think that whatever they and their comrades believe is, by definition, what "the American people" believe, even when all empirical data proves that the opposite is true.
And therein lies the sea change. Print media dies each and every day. Even bold commentators who speak truth to power like McClatchy struggle in this digital age. The mainstream network press will follow right behind. Information and analysis is ubiquitous and immediate. Leave aside the
ridiculous profile of Rush Limbaugh that appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine this weekend, as he is as much "mainstream media" as Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather. Lord knows, reading between the lines of that article, he sat up nights crying himself senseless because Brokaw and Rather considered him a low class drug addled fatty, and wouldn't let him cocktail with them at the Waldorf. The truth and the future lies with the bloggers, like Greenwald, who in a few short keystrokes dispel the myths and outright lies of the lazy mainstream press.
Things will never be the same.
