Ignorance Isn't Always Bliss

Can you please explain to me how a respected journalist can publish an explosive story on the front page the NY Times, win a Pulitzer Prize for it then get ignored by the television news media?

Simple. The television news media are among the biggest criminals in David Barstow's prize-winning story about how the Pentagon fanned out dozens of retired generals for propaganda purposes glorifying our mission in Iraq, even allowing them to enrich themselves by pimping for their new employers in the military industrial complex. In other words, they not only helped Rumsfeld lie to us, they still want to keep us in the dark instead of coming clean and saying, "Mea culpa."

KingOneEye at Daily Kos published a post last Saturday entitled, "Why We Need a Blogosphere" and if you ever needed a reason as to why we still need one in the post-Bush, warm-and-fuzzy Age of Obama, this is it.

The only television news outlet that has interviewed Barstow over this story that comes right out of Goebbel's and Hitler's Nazi Germany is Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! Barstow still has not been given any air time on either Rachel Maddow's or Keith Olbermann's shows. Now, being completely ignored by the likes of Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly is predictable but when KO doesn't even bother giving this story any more than cursory attention, it's kind of disheartening. Is it really up to largely ignored people like Goodman and talk show comedians like Jon Stewart and David Letterman to give us the most controversial and troubling news of the day? I thought we'd gotten enough of that from 2001-2009.

Furthermore, why should such a story depend upon bloggers to gain any traction whatsoever? We should supplement the news, filter it at best, not supplant it. The news being ignored, however, is the news story here and what's happening here is criminally neglectful.

It has almost sinister overtones that remind me of what happened to another Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Gary Webb, when in 1996 published his three part series, "Dark Alliance" on the pages of the San Jose Mercury News. Webb's 20,000 word series linked the crack epidemic, the CIA, cocaine trafficking and the Nicaraguan contras. Webb's scholarship on the subject was absolutely perfect and subsequent revelations in the wake of Webb's "suicide" prove him more right than he was 13 years ago.

Webb's forcible excommunication from the media complex was without a doubt the most vicious, mean-spirited and vindictive pogrom in the history of American journalism, involving not merely right wing Reagan apologists but also noted liberal journalists. I'd sure hate to see the same thing happen to David Barstow for being courageous enough to remind us that no matter who's in power, no matter who the talking heads are, our media and the American government they serve are eternally corrupt and self-serving.