Lies Run Big, Facts Small in U.S. Media

So says the bi-line in Ted Rall's latest piece-o-crap. The title, and the bi-line, seduced me with an almost sane suggestion: the US Media really is going downhill. Wow, for once, might I actually agree with Rall?

No. My reverie was short lived.

Was the piece about Rathergate, or the breaking Newsweek mess that has caused over a dozen deaths in Afghanistan? No. Rather, Rall decided to deconstruct the media coverage of Pat Tillman, the US Army Ranger who was killed in Afghanistan after refusing a multi-million dollar NFL contract.

Rall does what he does best: plays up the "hysterical, screaming, loony leftist paranoid schizophrenic" angle, and downplaying the "tact and diplomacy" angle, as is typical.

I should have known what I was getting when I clicked the link. Still, I was hoping against hope that some loud, shrill voice of the left, like Rall, was going to pick up the banner of "Truth in Media" and run with it for the right reasons. Alas, this is what I got.

The weapons of mass destruction turned out to be a figment of Donald Rumsfeld's imagination. The Thanksgiving turkey Bush presented to the troops turned out to be plastic, as much of a staged photo op as the gloriously iconic and phony toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad by jubilant Iraqi civilians--well, actually a few dozen marines and
CIA-financed operatives. So many of the Administration's "triumphs" have been exposed as frauds that one has to wonder whether that was really Saddam in the spider hole.

We shouldn't blame the White House for producing lies; that's what politicians do. But we expect better from the media who disseminate them.