A question that should frighten everyone

Dave Lindorff of the International Labor Communications Association, asks what I consider the question of the month--maybe the year:

When CBS goofed up, people were fired and quit in disgrace. But when dozens, maybe hundreds of news outfits run Bush administration-made propaganda posing as legitimate news reports, nobody has to resign. What gives here?

What gives, indeed? "The real culprit in this massive propaganda scam though," writes Lindorff, "has to be the public, which seems to take little interest in actively evaluating the news it is being spoon-fed."

That is because the public is: a. intellectually lazy; b. not trained by the educational system to do analytical thinking; and c. hearing what it wants to hear: America is strong and good, and our enemies must be vanquished. Those enemies, of course, are terrorists, but terrorists cannot be vanquished by blowing up countries, and it doesn't take a degree in geo-political science to figure that out.

But then there are our other enemies: people of color, uppity women, homosexuals, and dissenters. The message of the Bush administration is very much like the message of the Reagan administration: If you are fed up with the queers, liberals, athiests, and welfare queens, stick with us; we're fed up with them, too. It worked for Reagan--he is now considered nothing less than a god--and it works for Bush. It has worked for every fascistic power-hungry leader in history.

The White House controls the media, so there will be no repercussions for the newspapers, wire services, and television news networks that distribute White House propaganda, even when it is wrapped in extra layers of deception.