Why doesn't the mainstream media recognize how disastrous the Bush administration has been?

The mainstream media treatment of the Downing Street Memos provides a real insight into their thinking. The best current example is the Downing Street Memos. Why have the major media ignored the Downing Street Memos?

Michael Kinsey, speaking for the mainstream media, considers the DSM to be a paranoid fantasy from the left that has been promoted to near media respectability.

A full discussion of the mainstream media's treatment of the DSM is provided by TomDispatch.

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Let me extract what I think is central.

Mark Danner writes at length on how Michael Kinsley (and by implication the entire mainstream media) has both missed the point of the Downing Street Memos and how the American media has failed to adequately report on the reasons and motivations that led to the war in Iraq. The following are a few key statements from his letter.

We come by information incrementally, and give it sense by placing it in a context we have already constructed; that is why Kinsley's "test" for whether or not the Downing Street memo is "worthless" is so misguided. Those who do look at the memo's account of the cabinet meeting with some honesty -- and I urge readers to go to the memo itself; it is barely three pages long and the New York Review of Books has published it in full [8] -- will find it confirms a precise historical narrative of the run-up to the war. It is clearly written and, notwithstanding the comments of Kinsley and others, unambiguous.

Kinsley, like many others in the American press, wantsto judge the memo's "worth" on whether or not it contains, as he says, "documentary proof that President Bush had firmly decided to go to war against Iraq by July 2002." As I have written, such "documentary proof" -- if we are talking about firm and incontrovertible evidence of what was in Mr. Bush's mind at the time -- is destined to prove elusive; the President can always claim, all appearances and outward evidence to the contrary, that he "hadn't made up his mind." And so he has claimed.

He [Kinsley] is concerned only with a single question: Does the memo offer "documentary proof that President Bush had firmly decided to go to war against Iraq by July 2002"? Having decided that the memo falls short of passing this stern test, he deems the document "worthless." Like many in the American press, he is so obsessed with finding the "smoking gun" that he pretty much manages to miss the point of what is in front of him.

The Downing Street memo serves, among other things, as a not very subtle reminder that much of the press was duped by the government in a rather premeditated and quite successful way. No one likes to be reminded of this, certainly not reporters and the institutions they work for; claiming the memo is "not reportable," in Smith's words, not only avoids revisiting a painful passage in American journalism but does so by asserting that the story "had already been covered" -- that is, that it had never been missed in the first place. When it comes to the war, much of American journalism has little more institutional interest in reexamining the past than the Bush administration itself.

Many of us who remember Watergate have suffered under the fantasy that there was an investigative press. That is what we learned from Woodard, Bernstein and "Deepthroat.".

What we forget is that the Watergate investigation by the Washington Post was ramrodded by Ben Bradley and fully supported by the Publisher, Katherine Graham. Katherine Graham was the classic Washington insider. For whatever reason, she disliked Nixon and his methods. Since she owned her own newspaper, she had the personal power to do something about her dislike.

From this there grew up a fantasy that we have a free press that will investigate abuses in the government. The rise of FOX News and the right-wing echo chamber clearly shows that there is no such 'free press', and the consolidation of the national press into a few large corporations has eliminated almost any hint of independence. The mainstream media is now little more than another large corporate special interest with strong desires not to rock the boat of high government officials.

What has happened is that the Iraq War and the Downing Street Memos have proven that the myth of a free journalistic press has died in America.

So now it is a matter of "Up The Blogosphere!"

I hope.