Chuck Todd, White House Correspondent

Glenn Greenwald allows Chuck Todd of (MS)NBC to demonstrate his thought process. With "reporters" like this, it's no wonder that king george was able to break the law at will...
(the previous article they reference is here)

a sampling:

GG: So what do you think happens - I think what has destroyed our reputation is announcing to the world that we tolerate torture, and telling the world we don't --
CT: We have elections, we also had an election where this was an issue. A new president, who came in there, and has said, we're not going to torture, we're going to do this, and we're going to do this--
GG: What do you think should happen when presidents--
CT: Is that not enough? Isn't that enough?
GG: When, generally, if I go out and rob a bank tomorrow, what happens to me is not that I lose an election. What happens is to me is that I go to prison. So, what do you think should happen when presidents get caught committing crimes in office? What do you think ought to happen?
CT: You see, this is where, this is not - you cannot sit here and say this is as legally black and white as a bank robbery because this was an ideological, legal --
GG: A hundred people died in detention. A hundred people. The United States Government admits that there are homicides that took place during interrogations. Waterboarding and these other techniques are things that the United States has always prosecuted as torture.
Until John Yoo wrote that memo, where was the lack of clarity about whether or not these things were illegal? Where did that lack of clarity or debate exist? They found some right-wing ideologues in the Justice Department to say that this was okay, that's what you're endorsing. As long the president can do that, he's above the law. And I don't see how you can say that you're doing anything other than endorsing a system of lawlessness where the president is free to break the law?
CT: Well, look, I don't believe I'm endorsing a system of lawlessness; I'm trying to put in the reality that as much that there is a legal black and white here, there is a political reality that clouds this, and you know it does too.

So, the lesson I take from this is that no matter what a President (past, present or future) does, the corporate owned media (in this case, a joint venture of MSFT & GE) will be cheerleading (unless it impacts their bottom line). No wonder people are abandoning traditional media as fast as credible alternatives become available.

This Is What Happens...

...when you cut funding to NPR and "allow" them to make up the shortfall by taking corporate advertising. Another corporatist news outlet. Today's example:

I listened to this Planet Money interview yesterday and it wasn't even close. Elizabeth Warren, a class act in every sense, totally destroyed the host's argument that concerning herself with the economic health of the American family was somehow her liberal "pet cause" and outside her bailiwick as TARP oversight chair. Not that it made any difference in his evident scorn!

NPR may have some nice little essays, but the only time their hosts show anything resembling teeth is when they attack... people who attack corporate interests! From the Columbia Journalism Review's "So That's Why The Press Won't Cover Elizabeth Warren!" by Ryan Chittum:

A couple of times in the last few months I’ve taken the press to task for ignoring the Congressional Oversight Panel and its report on the TARP. I’ve talked to reporters in the biz since and got the impression that many of them don’t really take it seriously because its chairwoman Elizabeth Warren is a liberal who, they say, pushes her agenda.

So it’s worth listening to this entire Planet Money podcast from NPR, where Adam Davidson badgers Warren for more than an hour to justify her existence, so to speak.

If you want a peek inside business-press mentality, and why certain stories get reported and others don’t, you can do worse than start here. It sees Warren as an outlier whose views, based on decades of research, are suspicious. It would never, ever have badgered a former bank exec, say, like this if one had been chairman of the panel. Davidson, like the reporters I referenced above, has been talking to too many bankers and insiders who sneer at someone not inside their bubble. Perhaps he’s trying to prove his objective journalist bona fides at “liberal” NPR by taking it to a liberal.

Yeah, what right does she have trying to make the taxpayer-funded bailout provide some actual benefit to taxpayers?!?! Doesn't she know that we're all here to provide executive bonus guarantees?? She is such a liberal!

Funny thing about liberals

My observation so far is that conservatives will fall in line behind their leader no matter what he does or says. Liberals or progressives on the other hand are convinced that their leaders will sell them out at the earliest opportunity and interpret actions and words in the most negative way possible. While I get a little tired of all the cries of "traitor" and "sellout", it pretty much negates the argument I get from conservatives that I don't know the "real truth" because I only get info from the "Obama-loving liberal media" (hmm...[blank]-lover! where have I heard that before?).

I won't go into a diatribe about how the news media in the US is owned by large corporations and how that biases their product to the benefit of those corporations (such as profiting from war, via government contracts). But, I will say that there is a striking difference between watching Fox continue to cheerlead for the last administration's torture policies and watching Olbermann or Maddow take President Obama to task for not calling for criminal investigations into those policies. I think that a lot of the angst on the left is a product of getting their asses handed to them by the conservatives for most of the last 40 years, but the instinct is correct: question authority.

Right Wing Media

Great point made on Daily Kos regarding how the corporate-owned media are uncritically repeating Replublican talking points on the stimulus package without examining the substance of those talking points.