ah, she was a RINGER

from yesterday's media citizen

Media No Longer Taking Flak?

Our CEO president continues to treat news as widgets to be fabricated and sold to an unsuspecting public. Witness yesterday's Iraq war charade: a carefully orchestrated White House video link-up with Iraq that used U.S. soldiers as extras to shed positive light on Bush's war strategy.We know this only because the charade was reported as such in the AP, the Washington Post and on NPR. Such dogged objectivity is a new tack for many of our colleagues in the mainstream. But by revealing the man behind the curtain, they also lay bare the machinations of their own public deception.That some in mainstream media are no longer giving this president a free pass to the front page is news in its own right. Bush's plummeting approval rating might have something to do with their newfound skepticism, which raises another issue altogether: It seems our media eagerly pile scorn upon a president when his numbers are down, but give him the benefit of the doubt when they're up.This would suggest that mainstream media don't inform the public based upon the objective merits of a story, but merely tailor their reporting to respond to the flux and flow of popular opinion.I'll leave that frightening theory to be sorted out by the media analysts at Pew and PEJ. For now, let's look at the propaganda at hand:Reporting on yesterday's Bush-Iraq video-op, the Village Voice's Ward Harkavy finds that it involved an actor from within his own sausage factory. "The soldier on the left side of the front row was actually a flak herself, though she didn't reveal it during the regime's 24-minute infomercial."The soldier in question is Master Sgt. Corine Lombardo; she works in public affairs for the military as spokesperson to the media. While she's emerged elsewhere in mainstream reports on Iraq, she hasn't always been identified in her role.......................................