Remember when you guys were all political?

Those were some good times. I found a speech by Bill Moyers that's mostly about public media but also talks about what's going on with the media in general, and it echoes a lot of what I guess we talked about before everything went to shit in 2004.

Mermin also quotes public television’s Jim Lehrer, whom I greatly respect, acknowledging that unless an official says something is so, it isn’t news. Why were journalists not discussing the occupation of Iraq? “Because,” says Jim Lehrer, “the word ‘occupation’ was never mentioned in the run up to the war. Washington talked about the war as a war of liberation, not a war of occupation. So as a consequence, those of us in journalism,” says Lehrer, “never even looked at the issue of occupation.” “In other words,” says Jonathan Mermin, “if the government isn’t talking about it, we don’t report it.”

It blows my mind that Jim Lehrer admits he's a sucker for the party line.