An Upside-Down Media

This is especially true after the Prudhoe Bay oil spill and the massive protests in Chicago, both of which occurred in the past several days and received insufficient attention in the national media...

By Robert Parry
February 18, 2006

The gravest indictment of the American news media is that George W. Bush has gutted the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter – yet this extraordinary story does not lead the nation’s newspapers and the evening news every day.

Nor does the press corps tie Bush’s remarkable abrogation of both U.S. and international law together in any coherent way for the American people. At best, disparate elements of Bush’s authoritarian powers are dealt with individually as if they are not part of some larger, more frightening whole.

What’s even odder is that the facts of this historic power grab are no longer in serious dispute. The Bush administration virtually spelled out its grandiose vision of Bush’s powers during the debates over such issues as Jose Padilla’s detention, Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination and the disclosure of warrantless wiretaps.
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the danger is the media’s failure to react to Bush’s unprecedented assertion of power inside the United States.

Just as the nation’s elite editorial pages misunderstood the reality in the Middle East, most columnists are missing the extraordinary transformation now underway toward a system of American authoritarianism.

The pundits would rather bathe in the feel-good rhetoric about Bush spreading freedom and democracy around the world than face the harsh reality of Bush eradicating constitutional safeguards at home.