Ben Slade

"...The Washington Post published an political lobbying article, presented as a news story, which could be a signal of the death of the Post as an independent and objective news source.

The piece, entitled 'Support grows for tackling nation's debt,' appeared to be one of those background news pieces common in newspapers like the Post.

But article was written not by the newspaper's reporters - and not by an objective wire service, like the Associated Press - but by a new organization called The Fiscal Times, whose founder and major backer [is] Peter G. Peterson [partner in Wall Street’s Blackstone Group and former Republican Treasury Secretary, president of the Concord coalition to reduce the deficit]

I might even support radical plans to cut the deficit, but that's not the point. I want to know who I can trust, and apparently the Washington Post is no longer on the list.

It's just shocking that the Post would so casually sell their journalistic soul. Shouldn't an editor at the Wash Post get fired or demoted for this?

From an article by Eric Alterman for The Nation:

Here is the liberals' problem in a nutshell: More than 30 percent of Americans happily answer to the appellation "conservative," while 18 percent call themselves "liberal." And yet when questioned by pollsters, a super-majority of more than 60 percent take positions liberal in everything but name. Indeed, on many if not most issues, Americans hold views well to the left of those espoused by almost any national Democratic politician.

The book Censored 2003 discusses the top 25 censored news stories of 2000-2002. An excerpt of the book can be found here.

The excerpt includes an analysis of why the US media doesn't seem to cover these stories. Basically, the reasons boil down to:

• How big money corporate interests drive government
• How media corporations save money on investigative reporting resulting in an unhealthy dependence on official sources.
• How most people are oblivious to the whole issue.

From The War Room column by Eric Boehlert for Salon.com, May 05

Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees public television and believes there is a liberal bias in NPR's news coverage, eventhough polls say the public doesn't think so.

That hasn't stopped Tomlinson from seting up a monitor to oversee NPR's Middle East coverage to check it for bias, too...

By Eric Boehlert from Salon.com, Feb 10, 2005
(Subscription required. Sign up for Salon.com here )

Why was a partisan hack, using an alias and with no journalism background, given repeated access to daily White House press briefings?

From PIPA.org, Oct 18 2004

Despite the widely-publicized conclusions of the [CIA] Duelfer report [saying no WMD in Iraq and no significant Iraq-Al Qaeda connection], the following unbelievable polling statistics were reported by The Program on International Policy Attitudes:

By William Rivers Pitt, TruthOut.org, Sept 21 2004

The American mainstream television news media, in whole and in part, has catastrophically failed the American people and is singularly responsible for the untimely deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people...