MARK STEYN ON THE MEDIA

MARK STEYN ON THE MEDIA and how they’ve covered Susan Lindauer, the journalist and Democratic staffer charged with working for Saddam’s intelligence agency:

It’s one thing for the press to be antiwar and feel Saddam should be given another decade or two to come into compliance with Security Council resolutions. It’s quite another to be so smitten with the old butcher that your copy editors internally absorb Ba’ath Party tribal politics and assume that mere second cousinship with members of the Bush clan automatically puts you in the inner circle.

Steyn writes it’s no wonder why “the media are held in such low regard by the public–in polls of the most respected professions we usually come somewhere between Nigerian e-mail scammers and serial pedophiles”.

That’s brutal. Brutally honest, that is. It also explains why the media have been losing its audience–and simultaneously losing its employees–at a rapid clip from the 1990s to today.

But there’s more from Steyn:

Anyone who took the war seriously can certainly find fault with the administration. But not if you stand there like a 5-year-old boy and never get beyond pointing your fingers and sticking your tongue out: “Ooh, Bush lied. And Ashcroft’s a big bully. And Cheney’s stealing it all for his oil buddies. And you shouldn’t mention the war in your campaign ads, because it’s not fair. Nyaa-nyaa.”

Two hundred people died in Madrid because of a war Democrats refuse to admit exists. But hey, you never know, maybe the guy who did it will be a third cousin twice removed of Karl Rove.

Read the whole thing.

Will the media learn? This recent “admission” by Boston Globe reporter Patrick Healy that he flubbed a key quote by John Kerry–despite the fact that Kerry has defended that very quote–sounds more like taking one for the team (and Kerry, its de facto leader) than any sort of responsible journalism.