Cast of Characters: Part IV

"This year's elections are not only contests between Democrats and Republicans, they are contests in which the mainstream media are not simply observers and reporters but active partisans.

Remember how the media carried on for weeks about Vice President Cheney's hunting accident? How a Time magazine reporter had a temper tantrum at a White House press briefing because the news wasn't released soon enough -- as if this hunting accident had any significance for the nation, beyond those in the media who were frustrated at being deprived of a Sunday talk show feeding frenzy?

Remember how long we were told that the Bush administration had committed a crime by revealing the identity of a CIA 'agent' as revenge for her husband's having attacked administration policy? Indignant editorials in print and on the air practically salivated at the prospect of seeing Vice President Cheney, or at least Republican strategist Karl Rove, frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.

It was a terrible crime, as portrayed in the media, when they thought it would discredit the Bush administration. Now, very belatedly, it turns out that the leak did not originate in the Bush administration after all, but with a critic of that administration, Richard Armitage."

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