It turns out that we are living in an authoritarian dictatorship. At least that is the lesson that the Guardian learned from Memogate.

The role of the media corporations in the US is similar to that of repressive state regimes elsewhere: they decide what the public will and won't be allowed to hear, and either punish or recruit the social deviants who insist on telling a different story. The journalists they employ do what almost all journalists working under repressive regimes do: they internalize the demands of the censor, and understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and what is not.

So, when they are faced with a choice between a fable which helps the Republicans, and a reality which hurts them, they choose the fable. As their fantasies accumulate, the story they tell about the world veers further and further from reality. Anyone who tries to bring the people back down to earth is denounced as a traitor and a fantasist. And anyone who seeks to become president must first learn to live in fairyland

note: I think that the "fable" they are referring to is the Armstrong Williams story.

The whole article is a mish-mash of history. They bring up a 1998 story on the use of sarin nerve gas Viet Nam. The story was later retracted.

But after four weeks of furious denunciations, the network's owner, Ted Turner, publicly apologists in terms you would expect to hear during a show trial in North Korea: "I'll take my shirt off and beat myself bloody on the back." CNN had erred, he said, by broadcasting the allegations when "we didn't have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt".

Clinton was still president in 1998 so I'm not sure how that shows the media being biased for Republicans.

It's true, of course, that CBS should have taken more care. But I think it is safe to assume that if the network had instead broadcast unsustainable allegations about John Kerry, none of its executives would now be looking for work. How many people have lost their jobs, at CBS or anywhere else, for repeating bogus stories released by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth about Kerry's record in Vietnam?

The Swift Boat Vets have become the standard defense for CBS. No one in the press was fired for repeating their stories. Now, when the SwiftVets ads started running I was watching the media and the blogs. I didn't see any positive coverage of the story. The best that anyone did was to have people representing both sides.

Also, I don't remember anyone doing a real investigation into the SwiftVets' allegations. I do remember some prominent columnists wondering why no one had dug enough to discredit the SwiftVets.

So the two are not at all similar.

The Guardian also says:

The incident couldn't have been more helpful to Bush. Though there is no question that he managed to avoid serving in Vietnam, the collapse of CBS's story suggested that all the allegations made about his war record were false, and the issue dropped out of the news. CBS was furiously denounced by the rightwing pundits, with the result that between then and the election, hardly any broadcaster dared to criticism George Bush. Mary Mapes, the producer whom CBS fired, was the network's most effective investigative journalist: she was the person who helped bring the Abu Ghraib photos to public attention. If the memos were faked, the forger was either a moron or a very smart operator.

Funny thing, the Viet Nam service issue finally died out but I remember a lot of other negative coverage of Bush between the CBS story and the election. The worst that can be said is that it made reporters check their sources, something that Mapes neglected to do.

Of course I don't expect much from the Guardian. This is the same paper that was hoping for an assassination.

Normally the loser of a presidential race has the grace to refrain from public comment about the winner. Gore bent that tradition, coming back to campaign against Bush. Not Kerry has broken the tradition. First he went to Iraq and told the soldiers how HE would have handled the war had he been president (except he would never have invaded int he first place). Then he used Martin Luther King Day to alledge voter suppression.

"In Democratic districts, it took people four, five, 11 hours to vote, while Republicans [went] through in 10 minutes. Same voting machines, same process, our America," Kerry said.

This isn't even true. The waiting lines were uneven across party lines and Democrats were as responsible as Republicans for allocation of voting machines.

The Captain's Quarters shows that there is as much likelihood of cheating in Wisconsin as in Ohio but no one cares. I suspect that this is a baseless as the Ohio and Florida stories. Never the less, where is Keith Olbermann on this one?