Bush Gets Pass as Media Pile on ‘Lowly, Broken Individual’

Glenn Greenwald has a Salon update (12/15/08, ad-viewing required) on corporate media apathy toward the U.S. Senate report finding George W. Bush and his highest appointees responsible for U.S. detainee “deaths caused by abusive treatment”–many of which “have been formally characterized as ‘homicides’ by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan”:

This report was issued on Thursday. Not a single mention was made of it on any of the Sunday news talk shows, with the sole exception being when John McCain told George Stephanopoulos that it was “not his job” to opine on whether criminal prosecutions were warranted for the Bush officials whose policies led to these crimes….

Instead, TV pundits were consumed with righteous anger over the petty, titillating, sleazy Rod Blagojevich scandal, competing with one another over who could spew the most derision and scorn for this pitiful, lowly, broken individual and his brazen though relatively inconsequential crimes. Every exciting detail was voyeuristically and meticulously dissected by political pundits–many, if not most, of whom have never bothered to acquaint themselves with any of the basic facts surrounding the monumental Bush lawbreaking and war crimes scandals

Greenwald finds “the media fixation on the ultimately irrelevant Blagojevich scandal, juxtaposed with their steadfast ignoring of the Senate report documenting systematic U.S. war crimes,” to be “perfectly reflective of how our political establishment thinks.”

See items No. 17-20 in the retrospective published by FAIR’s magazine Extra!: “20 Stories That Made a Difference: For Better or Worse” (1-2/06) by Steve Rendall, Peter Hart & Julie Hollar