The media doesn't drive the election - Oh no. Just ask them - Powerless wanks is all they are.

Ask a member of the political Press corps why they engage in on-the-bus groupthink and drive public expectations for the various candidates and ignore the candidates they don't like, and you will get the reply "Moi? You attribute that much power to little old me?"

Yeah. I do. And so does Glenn Greewald.

For all his obvious political abilities, Obama seems to have almost no clue regarding the real problems that the incoming President is going to have to face. He is running on his good looks and sunny disposition, with little real substance presented. He is the weakest of the three major Democratic candidates, yet the Press has anointed him "The Winner" and wants to ride his coattails to the White House. To do this they are smearing Hillary and ignoring Edwards.

They are doing much the same thing to the Republican candidates, although they tried hard to anoint Giuliani until he was found to simply not be up to prime time. McCain is now the Press flavor-of-the-week.

I'm not sure if the problem is that the political Press is afraid to dig into the real problems of America and so focus strictly on a press narrative driven by personality and who they like personally, or if they feel that they are part of the establishment and have to defend it. Whatever it is, the Press is making damned sure that American voters are as uninformed about the political capabilities of the various candidates as possible.

By obscuring the real issues, the Press becomes an extremely powerful influence in who gets elected as President and how America will operate in the next four to eight years. Let's never forget that the Press, through it's obvious detest of Gore, gave us an election in 2000 that was close enough to be stolen by the "Nice Guy" (and utter incompetent) George.

Should Cindy Adams be protected under a Press shield law or policy?

Cindy Adams is the gossip columnist for the New York Post. From Radar on line. we learn that Ms. Adams somehow learned and then published that the D.C. Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, was planning to dump her current lawyer and replace him with one who would challenge the law against Prostitution that Ms. Palfrey is charged with violating.

This is information available only to Ms. Palfrey, her attorneys, and the Prosecution in her case and was under court seal. Ms. Palfrey alleges that the leak was a dirty trick by the Prosecution intended to use the "media outlets to disseminate or spin misleading information about Jeane."

If true, this is a severe violation of professional ethics by the Prosecution. The spokesperson for the Department of Justice denied that anyone in the Prosecution had done such a thing.

Cindy Adams has been subpoenaed to testify who her source was.

Publishing this leak does not seem to have any socially redeemable features. It seems to me that it could only act to make a fair trail for Ms. Palfrey more difficult to achieve. So my question is - should Cindy Adams in particular and the Press in general expect any legal right to withhold the name of Ms. Adam's source?

Most leaks from whistle-blowers are provided by people who have a personal act to grind. Such leaks have allowed the public to learn of some real crimes and injustices. But at the same time, the current administration has clearly provided leaks of otherwise classified information to be published by favored members of the press so that the position of the Bush administration could be put out while the arguments against the Bush administration's positions are hidden behind the veil of government secrecy. If someone in the Prosecutors office leaked this information to Cindy Adams, this is a case in which the Prosecution is violating a court seal in order to try Ms. Palfrey in the Press.

I used to support a Press Shield Law, but cases like this and like Judy Miller at the New York Times have caused me to have strong second thoughts. Without a Press Shield Law reporters like Cindy Adams will have to promise not to reveal a source and then take the legal heat on themselves when subpoenaed. That leaves the reporter and their publication with having to answer whether the benefit of publishing the leak is worth the legal heat.

There seems to be very little value in the publication of this leak in a gossip column.

Refurbished White House Press room opened.

This is interesting news. White House Press Corp Welcomed Back Into Refurbished, Rat-Free Briefing Room.

But - but - if it was to be rat-free, why are they letting White House reporters in? Special dispensations for selected rats?

This is what happened to our national Press Corps

Glenn Greenwald interview Helen Thomas to find out how she felt about the relationship between the Press and the President. Here is a very revealing part of an excellent interview:

GG: You have covered every President since John Kennedy. I wanted to ask if you could identify how the White House press corps has changed over time, if it has, and what differences are there in terms of how journalists cover presidents?

HT: Well, that's a big order. But I do think that in the good olden days, reporters were really straight reporters. I worked for a wire service, UPI, for 57 years, and I covered the White House for UPI from the 70s onto Bush, and then became a columnist. So I certainly know both sides.

As a wire service reporter, I played it straight, with the facts, which is absolutely required of a wire service reporter. But that doesn't mean I bowed out of the human race. I permitted myself to think, to care, to believe, but it didn't get in my copy.

I did think that tough questions were always very important. With Kennedy, we knew he enjoyed the banter with the press, and he had the first live televised news conferences. And it made a big difference in terms of really capturing the imagination of the public. It was the first time they really saw reporters in action, they saw a witty president that was able to dodge questions as deftly as anyone, and he had great eloquence. That was the first time the American people really became interested in presidential news conferences.

And then Johnson had a love-hate relationship with the press. He couldn't live without us, and yet at the same time, he thought we were hurting him every day. The words "credibility gap" were created in that era.

With Nixon, that is when news management and manipulation really began. Now, every president wants to put his best foot forward, and always be able to manage and manipulate news coverage.

All presidential candidates, especially, vow to run an open administration. But they step foot in the Oval Office and the Iron Curtain slams down. Suddenly, all information that I think belongs in the public domain becomes their private preserve.

The manipulation of the press has become greater and greater. This is the most secretive administration I have ever covered. And they're all secretive.

GG: Has the press corps that covers the White House played a role in why the White House is so manipulative and why they're able to get away with such secrecy?

HT: Very much so. Reporters, after Watergate, realized that we had let so much go by us. They got much tougher when President Ford took over. It wasn't animosity. It was anger that we hadn't asked the right questions. And the press became tougher.

But they really went soft after 9/11. Reporters, I'm assuming, did not want to be called unpatriotic and un-American when we were in a national crisis.

And I don't think the corporate heads exactly wanted anyone to rock the boat at that time.

But I kept asking questions about the validity of going to war against a country that had done nothing to us.

Intimidation works on the Press Corps, too. There are a few exceptions, though. Helen Thomas is one, and the McClatchy News Service is another.

Go look at the entire interview. It is very good.

Why is the press reporting the Iraq War so negatively?

Borzou Daragahi, the former L.A. Times Baghdad Bureau Chief, gives his view to Editor and Publisher:

-- On charges that the press is too negative on Iraq:

Well, I would just say, show me those goods.

For example, is infant mortality going down? Is the number of attacks on U.S. and coalition forces going down?
Are the number of Iraqis who are fleeing the country declining? Is there an increase in employment? So, let’s see the facts.

Is there a decrease in the number of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians being killed day to day? If there is, we’ve reported it. I mean, if there has been – and we put it prominently on page one.

I remember when the recent Baghdad security plan first went into effect, and there was a dramatic decline in the number of sectarian death squad executions, that was on the front page of the “Los Angeles Times.”

So, I think that the people who say that criticism should at least read our product first.

When asked what he thought of the war when it started:

I think that in the beginning, I was conflicted as to whether I was – because I had the Kurdish perspective up there, you know. And you don’t fully adopt the perspective of the people that you’re covering. You can’t do that as a journalist. But you’re at least sympathetic to it.

And from the Kurdish point of view, they were very much in favor of the war. They very much viewed it as a liberation. And that was rather infectious.

And so, I can’t say that I was like completely against the invasion. I took a neutral, wait-and-see attitude....

Sort of what it’s turned into in the eyes of many people in the Middle East is a war of imperial conquest gone bad, done poorly. At least the Romans granted their captives citizenship and brought them into the fold and brought stability to the lands that they conquered.

And I think, in the Arab world – and this is a really disastrous thing, they basically view this is as, you know, the Americans came in and they destroyed an Arab country. And I don’t think they’ll ever forgive us for that.

The real question for Americans is whether the continued expenditure of American lives and treasure has any chance of succeeding. Why won't the "surge" work?

"Because there is not - even according to General Petraeus' own guidebook for fighting counterinsurgencies, they're not using soldiers, they're not using enough troops to accomplish their goals...But also, more fundamentally, I don't think that they can do this militarily. I don't think the fundamental problems in Iraq right now are military problems."

Obviously I am publishing this because he is saying what I already think is true. But he isn't saying it to please me. He is saying this because his reporting has led him to believe it. The People who disagree with him do not have similar reports from relatively disinterested reporters to back up their disagreements. They make assertions without facts or reporting to back up those assertions.

The failure in Iraq is in some ways similar to the failure in Viet Nam. first, the American military has been trained, equipped and staffed to fight a war against other armies. In both Viet Nam and in Iraq they have been sent in to conduct an occupation and counterinsurgency operations. Our leaders in both cases called it a war, but it mostly wasn't in viet Nam and it isn't today.

In both cases, our military has adapted as well as it could. But an occupation and counterinsurgency is more political than military. Our American leaders failed to recognize this, and failed completely to conduct the necessary political activities that could lead to success.

They also failed to conduct the management activities required. There is today no real political conception of what it means for America to "win" in Iraq. Without such an idea, an image of what success would look like as it were, there is little or nothing that the large groups of people we have placed in Iraq to work to succeed.

A strategy is a desired end-state together with the resources and coordination needed to achieve that end-state. The desired end-state is known to be political in nature, and is similarly known to be unachievable through purely military means. Worse, the desired end-state requires the good-will and efforts of the people of Iraq and more broadly of the Arabic people. That good-will was lost by 2004, and by now cannot be regained in less than a generation at a minimum.

So to answer the question with which I titled this article, the Press has been reporting the Iraq War negatively because there is little or no possible positive outcome. There may be positive things happening in Iraq and the Middle East but they are irrelevant to any form of success that America could hang its hat on before leaving.

So all we will see is negative reporting, until somehow we get the positive news that our troops are leaving the killing sands of the Middle East desert. The answer is just that simple.