Lies, Lies, Lies

I rarely post about "the media," partly because I think most of us already know intuitively that a large portion of what we read is crap, because we're not stupid. And partly because it's sort of like trying to tie everything to my former profession, like having been a POW explains everything.
Glenn Greenwald spends a lot of his time going after the media in great detail, and I usually read it and digest it.
But today he's done a piece well worth everyone knowing about, even if they don't read Politico, which is fairly new and online only and financed by some right-wing billionaire whose name I can't remember.
It's noteworthy partly because it cites McClatchy and Jay Rosen, not just Glenn Greenwald, as authorities on the subject.
There are other really great critics, but it's important to cite people in the business who know what they're talking about.
From McClatchy:

Why, in a nutshell, was our reporting different [in the run-up to the attack on Iraq] from so much other reporting? One important reason was that we sought out the dissidents, and we listened to them, instead of serving as stenographers to high-ranking officials and Iraqi exiles. I’m afraid that much the same thing may have happened on Wall Street. Power and money and celebrity, in other words, can blind you. Somehow, the idea has taken hold in Washington journalism that the value of a source is directly proportional to his or her rank, when in my experience the relationship is more often inverse.
That brings up a larger point, and one that I think is another part of what went wrong back in 2002, and what may have gone wrong on Wall Street. Instead of being members of the Fourth Estate, too many Washington reporters have been itching to move up an estate or two, to become part of the Establishment or share in the good times.