Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Damn the Constitution, Full Steam Ahead

Yesterday morning, before heading out of town, I had to hear Mara Liasson weighing in on why holding US government officials and agents accountable for grave crimes is so not-looking-forward.

Montagne opened the segment with this: "Today President Obama will attempt to keep the national focus on his plans for the future." She failed to mention that NPR would also be attempting to keep the focus there, too.

Liasson - even after noting that investigations or prosecutions would not target those who ordered and provided legal cover for torture, but only "operatives who went beyond even the legal guidance they were getting from the Bush justice department" - closed with this gem:
"...however this opens up a huge can of worms and if they do start prosecuting CIA operatives it will be a big distraction from the main issues on the President's agenda - like health care and the economy."
Take a look at Glenn Greenwald's post regarding a similar situation at NBC. Greenwald describes the NBC piece "as typical a discussion as it gets among media stars as to why investigations are so very, very wrong and unfair and unwise." The same could be said of the editorializing from NPR.

3 comments:

larry, dfh said...

Coincidence that? Acroos the broadcast spectrum , everyone's with the same talking points. I thought karl rove was out of town
Meanwhile, DemocracyNow! has sooo much more to offer this (Wed.). Through the years, it has always intrigued me to run a side-by-sde comparison between DN and npr.

larry, dfh said...

I mean, if 'the economy' and 'healthcare' were so frackin' important to npr, where are the coverages of these issues?

geoff said...

What, larry, you didn't hear the long and winding diatribe from Dr. Nussbaum this AM? The comments at NPR are pretty good. Looks like Nussbaum was among the lobby that bought Daschle.

I suspect Nussbaum's hatched a method for cutting costs of long term care: the snuff balm.