- BitsBlog - https://bitsblog.com -

Sanchez And the Press’ Willingness to Ignore It’s Own Faults

Yes, I saw the mess resulting from the comments of retired General Richard Sanchez.  One of the places I noticed it was at the Captain’s Quarters: [1]

It seems that half of the message retired General Richard Sanchez intended to deliver missed the cut at most newsrooms, and with most bloggers. Typical among the reports of his blistering oration is the front-page treatment [2] given by the Washington Post’s Josh White, the entire first half of Snachez’ speech — found in its entirety here [3] — gets reduced to a single paragraph at the end of the story. Why? Well, it turns out that Sanchez considered his first target the media itself, which he blames for a large part of the problems he sees in Iraq

If Sanchez has such credibility and standing to bring this kind of criticism to bear on Washington, why didn’t the Post and other news agencies give the same level of exposure to his media criticisms as well? He basically accuses them of cynically selling out the soldiers to defeat American efforts to win the war, and made sure that those accusations came first before his assessment of the political failures, but you’d never know that from the Post.

Nor from the New York Times, who was also on that particular story this morning, and took essentially the same angle as Ed mentions about the Post article.

This kind of gamesmanship out of the press, should be a surprise nobody who has been watching the situation in Iraq, and the supposed mainstream media reporting on it, yet I am always amazed by the sheer audacity displayed by those people.  Apparently, given the comments I’m seeing around the sphere, I’m not alone.

The reason for their blatant partisanship, as opposed to the somewhat less blatant version of twenty years ago, let’s say, is clear; they no longer monopolize what passes for news in this country.  Their response, to that competition, is to get bolder in their partisanship.  The motto, therefore, of the New York Times, has become “all the news that fits the leftist narrative “.

Thus, do we see what amounts to a report card on the leftist media, being issued by the general, being buried… not on a whim, as some have charged, but rather , as a tool for survival as such. The kind of criticisms that the general issued the press in this speech could not be printed, and therefore taken seriously, without some serious introspection, and ultimately serious changes in the way the mainstream media does business.

The readers, the consumers of the mainstream media, I suspect, see this more clearly than does the mainstream media itself.  Thereby a we see ever lowering subscription numbers to the New York Times, the Washington post, and so on.  The consumer is finding the credibility of the legacy news services wanting.  This editing of reality, obviously intended as a self protective move, will do nothing but worsen that perception, and that listening position in the world.

Personally, anything that lessons their position in the world, after this kind of deception, is fine by me.

See also The Strata-Sphere [4] Powerline [5] ScrappleFace [6] Right Truth [7], QandO [8], The Belmont Club [9] The Jawa Report [10], Outside The Beltway [11],