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The New Pinnacle of Journalism: <em>Us Weekly</em>

What traditional channel or network, magazine or newspaper can we trust anymore to give us serious factual news?
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It came up at a dinner party on Saturday night -- Rachel Sklar's column reporting that Wolf Blitzer had to cut away from an interview with Bill Cosby concerning inner city poverty so that CNN could cover You-Know-Who arriving at their studios for her interview with Larry King. A journalist friend commented that this is why she hardly watches CNN anymore, and that telling little incident is almost enough for me to not turn it on either. This is a rash thing to say since I live in France, my French is still bad, and news in English is hard to come by. But I see this as just another unfortunate example of the way the American press has been seriously going down the tubes for the last five years. What traditional channel or network, magazine or newspaper can we trust anymore to give us serious factual news?

I date my profound disappointment to the lead-up of the Iraq War. It's not like propaganda hasn't clearly been identified in political purposes for a century, and we all haven't had our own personal experiences with it, but for some perverse reason resulting from 9/11 when George W. got a run-amok-and-whip-the- paeans-and-press-into-a-war-mongering-frenzy-and-get-out-of-jail free card, the press did his dirty work. When he didn't have to be responsible -- except as a fearless leader spreading torrents of fear -- was this the beginning of our end?

Before and after the war started, my husband and I read reports of how terribly Americans were being treated in France, which we knew were patently untrue. We got reports from home about other ridiculous and absurd stories that were being printed, so that average Joes could feel superior to the French who refused to play W.'s game. We were told by other journalist friends who worked for a well-thought-of American publisher that they were instructed to ignore the real evidence about Iraq and the war -- in effect, to lay low about the truth and promote the Bush insanity. And this is just the least of it.

To my mind, American journalism was compromised partly by the powers-that-be in business and politics, partly by mass hysteria, and partly by a failure of individual personal integrity. You also can't dismiss the fact that war is an abstract concept extremely elusive to people who've never been in one -- like for example, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. Also, don't dismiss that virtual reality has replaced reality: a war in Iraq seemed like just another reality television show or video game. Play the Iraq War!

At the time, it seemed apparent that Democratic politicians were afraid to get in the way of W.'s warpath for fear of being labeled "un-American," as if Senator Joseph McCarthy had risen from the dead. Maybe this Republican administration and machine was smarter than the senator who sold fear of Communists rather than Islamic terrorists, but they had a half-century longer to learn even better keys to manipulating the masses and putting nooses around the necks of the news writers of America. Both orders got their backlash, which were too late to stop the destruction of too many lives.

Many years ago during Watergate I worked on Capitol Hill and learned the politics of politics in this highly charged environment, and I consider myself fairly politically savvy. I knew this war was wrong, but since thousands of Americans were on the street protesting what was widely seen as a huge mistake of a war to get into, I wasn't the only one who figured that Osama bin Laden was turning cartwheels over George W.'s and his ill regime's rush to throw a big war.

So our elected Democratic leaders lost their nerve and failed to stand up for what they had to know the rest of us believed. Or they were morons. I'm tired of anyone's double-speak about it. Let's call a spade a spade: Hillary Clinton still won't speak the truth about her stance on supporting the war in those days. She and many others were afraid that Bush and his fear-spreading zealots would crush them. They wouldn't get reelected, or worse in Hillary's case, she'd lose her shot at the presidency. I'm not saying I don't get it, but I'm saying she ought to have the decency to say she made a mistake instead of perpetually embarrassing herself by pandering. She needs to stand up and be a man along with the other male Democratic contenders in this race.

If our leaders didn't have the balls to do the right thing, our press should have been howling, not carrying a false message or acting fearful like our elected leaders. They shouldn't have been losing their hold on their and our values as one of the great hallmarks of American society. We've lost our clout as a democracy throughout the world. The American press failed, and it still needs to get a grip on itself. I call it a tragedy that our press has become so compromised.

Which brings us back to You-Know-Who. Don't get me wrong. I've been known to partake of celebrity gossip, although this race for senseless coverage of this-so-far-pointless girl has placed us certifiably around the bend. Why don't we just replace our president with a king or queen? They could be voted in after a reality TV series and voted out the same way. The current state of much of American journalism could fit in better to this environment. Two prime examples of high profile journalists sinking to new lows were Bob Woodward humiliating himself in the Plame scandal and Katie Couric highlighting her first CBS anchor evening newscast with the celebrity birth of Suri Cruise. (Please.)

When the best news program on TV is Jon Stewart's The Daily Show on Comedy Central, this might be an indication something is amiss. But, thank God for Jon.

Remarkably enough, one publication has taken a stand if just for a week, and even more wonderfully ironic, it's a gossip magazine. Us Weekly is doing what every other coverer of any low- to highbrow source of real news or celebrity gossip or pure trash ought to be doing: opting out.

It seems good journalism is two sides of a coin: Publishing all the news that's fit to print, or not covering the most worthless and distracting illusion.

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