Reply #6: The entire Greenwald piece really is a must-read, like a Rosetta Stone

[bleever]

to the Tower of Babel that is the fatally compromised corporate media that helped to bring us the Iraq war and two stolen elections.

What a repugnant though vivid microcosm this is for how so many of our Beltway journalists function. They think that their only job is to write down faithfully what they are told by both sides (if we're lucky) and call it a day. If one side is blatantly lying and the other side is telling the truth, that isn't for them to say.

Exactly like a stenographer in a court proceeding, their only job is to record the words that they hear accurately, not to identify what actually is true. And here is Klein admitting -- finally -- that this is exactly what he did (although in this case, he wasn't even a good stenographer since he only wrote down what one side said, not both).

The very idea of a reporter and a major news magazine publishing a piece about a crucial bill that neither the reporter nor any editor has ever even bothered to read is amazing. No blogger that I read regularly would ever think about doing that. But that's how the Bush administration has been able to depict all of its false statements about Iraq, and its illegal spying on Americans, as some sort of complex, impossible-to-resolve "controversy." GOP operatives say "X" and reporters write it down, and it would be terribly "partisan" for them to point out that "X" is actually an outright lie.