There will be hundreds of obituaries about Safer, but at least so far, there’s been no mention of what I think was one of the most important stories he ever told.
Slipping down a few paras to the BLUF.
But in the 50 years since, from essentially everything the Nixon administration said about Vietnam, to the Reagan administration’s claims justifying the invasion of Grenada, to the George H.W. Bush administration justifying the Gulf War because Iraqi forces were massed on the border of Saudi Arabia, to the Clinton administration’s wild exaggerations about Serbian violence in Kosovo, to essentially everything the Bush administration said about Iraq, to Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denying the National Security Agency gathers data on millions of Americans, most of the U.S. media has been, as Sylvester put it, "stupid."
Not to mention the Mohammad video, Benghazi, Susan Rice and the Sunday Talks.
Time and again, members of the Washington press corps have credulously accepted officials’ lies and misinformation and passed them on to their readers as the truth. Their real-time skepticism is almost nonexistent. And they keep doing it.
David Rhodes, brother of Presidential Advisor Ben Rhodes, is the President of CBS News. In February 2011, Rhodes was named President of CBS News, becoming the youngest network news president in the history of American television.
If you look at the last few weeks of the New York Times, you’ll learn that U.S. officials say that American troops in Yemen "are working at the headquarters’ level and are not near the front lines" and that a Navy SEAL killed in Iraq "was two to three miles behind the front lines" when it happened. Do you think they’re telling the truth? Assuming that would be stupid.
| If you want a skeptical press corps that doesn't believe everything it's told by insiders and game-players, you need a Republican president and a Republican administration... |
