Blog about CNN appearance

On Wednesday night, CNN's Jessica Yellin talked to Anderson Cooper about Scott McClellan's tell-all memoir and agreed with the former press secretary that White House reporters "dropped the ball" during the run-up to war.

But Yellin went much further, revealing that news executives--presumably at ABC News, where she'd worked  from July 2003 to August 2007--actively pushed her not do hard-hitting pieces on the Bush administration.

um yeah, LIBERAL MEDIA, OMFG!!! 

Jessica yellin' at Anderson is just about what it was...
:D

We were making this point five years ago and everybody was like, "You tinfoil hat guy!" 

It's like Jerry Brown said, "America is a one party state with the media controlled by the government!"

Hey, told ya so!

::)

This old news.

The media have traditionally deferred to white houses of all parties.

-Kennedy got a flyer as the media chose not to report that he was boning half the ladies of his time, or how he did any number of democratic foreign leaders/allies dirty.

-Roosevelt got a flyer as they never showed his true physical handicap, and the media chose to not report that he was completely checked out at the Yalta conference (my cousin was a military attache to the conference and said that Roosevelt "was completely out of his mind... belonged in a loony bin at the time..." in a completely deteriorated mental state).  And this was when much of the post-war world was being laid out

-Eisenhower got cut all sorts of slack for his, *ahem*, "extracurricular" activities

This old news.

The media have traditionally deferred to white houses of all parties.



yet those have nothing to do with starting a war, and are merely just personality defects.  Somehow I think ignoring the reasons for war are a little more important than who JFK was fooling around with.  You're also pointing out 40 year old issues.  I suppose Clinton's sleeping around got overlooked too right?

This old news.

The media have traditionally deferred to white houses of all parties.

-Kennedy got a flyer as the media chose not to report that he was boning half the ladies of his time, or how he did any number of democratic foreign leaders/allies dirty.

-Roosevelt got a flyer as they never showed his true physical handicap, and the media chose to not report that he was completely checked out at the Yalta conference (my cousin was a military attache to the conference and said that Roosevelt "was completely out of his mind... belonged in a loony bin at the time..." in a completely deteriorated mental state).  And this was when much of the post-war world was being laid out

-Eisenhower got cut all sorts of slack for his, *ahem*, "extracurricular" activities


That certainly wasn't the case with Clinton.  It was Monica 24/7 in 1998.

yet those have nothing to do with starting a war, and are merely just personality defects.  Somehow I think ignoring the reasons for war are a little more important than who JFK was fooling around with.  You're also pointing out 40 year old issues.  I suppose Clinton's sleeping around got overlooked too right?


If I recall correctly, all the hubbub about Monica Lewinsky and the stained dress was not broken by the press.  Rather it all came out because a "friend" of Lewinsky's had tape recorded a conversation wherein Monica confided about the stained dress, the cigars, etc, and it was introduced as court evidence.  Yeah, at that point the press picked it up, but there was no way they could NOT have.

And as for my examples, the press ignoring that the President of the United States was completely out of his mind while at the bargaining table with the leaders of the Allied powers, deciding the fate of Europe (and the groundwork for the 40-year Cold War) is far more than a "overlooking a personality defect".

If I recall correctly, all the hubbub about Monica Lewinsky and the stained dress was not broken by the press.  Rather it all came out because a "friend" of Lewinsky's had tape recorded a conversation wherein Monica confided about the stained dress, the cigars, etc, and it was introduced as court evidence.  Yeah, at that point the press picked it up, but there was no way they could NOT have.

And as for my examples, the press ignoring that the President of the United States was completely out of his mind while at the bargaining table with the leaders of the Allied powers, deciding the fate of Europe (and the groundwork for the 40-year Cold War) is far more than a "overlooking a personality defect".


You're ignoring the fact that the media has changed a lot in recent decades.  The media of the 40s, 50s, and 60s were quite different than today's media.  Media is far more materialistic and corporate today than it was back then, and yellow journalism gets the ratings and money like nothing else.  Yet, this is less predictable than you would think....

The buildup to the Iraq War was flooded with patriotism and paranoia, where most media sources basically promoted the government's agenda in urging Americans to support a war against Iraq because of perceived threats.  By the same token, the media took a more negative tone once the war started going bad, because that sells just as well as patriotism.

So, it's not a simple matter of what the system supports -- it's what sells.