By Beth Arnold
It came up at a dinner party on Saturday night -- Rachel Sklar's column reporting that Wolf Blitzer had to cut away from an interview with Bill Cosby concerning inner city poverty so that CNN could cover You-Know-Who arriving at their studios for her interview with Larry King. A journalist friend commented that this is why she hardly watches CNN anymore, and that telling little incident is almost enough for me to not turn it on either. This is a rash thing to say since I live in France, my French is still bad, and news in English is hard to come by. But I see this as just another unfortunate example of the way the American press has been seriously going down the tubes for the last five years. What traditional channel or network, magazine or newspaper can we trust anymore to give us serious factual news?
I date my profound disappointment to the lead-up of the Iraq War. It's not like propaganda hasn't clearly been identified in political purposes for a century, and we all haven't had our own personal experiences with it, but for some perverse reason resulting from 9/11 when George W. got a run-amok-and-whip-the- peons-and-press-into-a-war-mongering-frenzy-and-get-out-of-jail free card, the press did his dirty work. When he didn't have to be responsible -- except as a fearless leader spreading torrents of fear -- was this the beginning of our end?
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