Eyes Wide Shut

In the course of a review in The Nation of a new edition of Walter Lippmann’s Liberty and the News, Michael Schudson makes the following snide comments disparaging the utterly true statements made by Sid Blumenthal on the steady degeneration of the press over the past few decades:

He offers no evidence of “degeneration” (which would require comparing a deficient present with a measurably better past) but instead only vents his frustration that today’s media largely parroted Bush Administration propaganda during the run-up to the Iraq War.

As anyone with a functioning brain could tell Schudson, the evidence of degeneration is all around us, so much so that Blumenthal didn’t feel the need to lay out cites for what the informed among us know to be self-evident. But in case Schudson really is sincere in implying that there is no evidence therefor, I yield the floor to Robert Parry of The Consortium:

By the late 1970s, the cumulative impact of those three examples of “liberal bias” – the battle against segregation, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal – became the catalyst for an extraordinary historical reaction. Conservatives, led by former Treasury Secretary William Simon and financed by major conservative foundations, began investing first tens of millions of dollars and later billions of dollars in building their own media, think tanks and attack groups. [For a brief history of the modern conservative media machine, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Democrats’ Dilemma.”]

Over the next quarter century, this conservative infrastructure emerged as a potent force in American politics, becoming effectively a firewall against the news media challenging key conservative policies and top Republican politicians.

By the way, Robert Parry — the man who helped break open the Iran-Contra story while he was at Newsweek — could use a few shekels thrown his way. Go help him.

Krugman, Jedi Knight

Here, thanks to Tanta and Calculated Risk

And in Other News: Squares Have Four Corners

In the United States, people with cancer who have no health insurance are twice as likely to die within five years as people who get medical care because they have some means to pay for it.

The logic is inescapable. If you don’t have health insurance, you don’t get preventive health treatment, including screenings for cancer and other serious ailments, because tests and even routine checkups are too expensive. You don’t get early intervention when illness develops because you can’t afford to go to the doctor. By the time you go to the doctor because the illness can’t be ignored any longer, it’s often too late, and you can’t afford the treatments anyway.

Whether you live or die should not be determined by how much money you have. Our privatized “you’re on your own-ership society” medical system is killing people.