If someone (like Bill O’Reilly, for instance), wants to moan about the “slant” of the Media Matters material, keep in mind the source of the forgerie accusations themselves:

Forgery feeding frenzy: Media falling afoul of … [Media Matters for America]

On September 9, Conservative media sources including L. Brent Bozell III’s Cybercast News Service, Internet gossip Matt Drudge, The Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes and FOX News Channel’s Special Report with Brit Hume followed right-wing bloggers in detailing evidence to support the claim that the documents were forged.

Then that “liberal media” grabbed onto it the next day, seeing a possible fascinating “media feeding frenzy” they weren’t about to “miss out on”. I imagine Eric Altermann could have a field day with this one (he wrote a book called “What Liberal Media?”). This all points to the types of points he makes throughout the book: that the mainstream media is “sensation-driven” (ie Profit-driven, since coverage of controversy sells books and newspapers and advertising for televeision). The outlets that attract the most readership are the ones that advertisers will tend to support, which makes the media ownership slant toward the bottom line, not political or intellectual accuracy.

Here, in this case, somehow we’ve allowed ourselves to be distracted from the real focus of this set of events: the military records of Bush re: his Guard duty (which is just what the Bush campaign desires)….but even beyond that, the actual job record of Bush as president, which does not hold up well at all under any kind of scrutiny: witness , for example, the determination of the Bush administratkion to stonewall and delay as long as possible the release of information regarding the various failures leading to 9/11. More scrutiny here could be (I pray that the people of the US listen and demand clarity) deadly to the Bush campaign. I am presently reading Bob Graham’s book , Intelligence Matters, which details the things he learned as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and co-chaired a bipartisan joint HOuse-Senate inquiry into the intelligence community’s failures that led to our failure to detect and closely monitor events that happened on 9/11.

Yes, there was obvious failure of the same during the Clinton administration, but as George Tenet was to say, the “system was blinking red” during 2001, and the Bush administration completely ignored the warnings. Bush went on vacation to Texas after he recived the now infamous PDB which outlined SPECIFIC activity clearly indicating that something was coming. The Bush administration denies that there was “anything actionable”. Richard Clarke, whom Rice had asked to stay on with the Bush adminstration because she was impressed with his knowledge of anti-terrorism, was dismissed after he testified that the Bush administration failed to pay any attention to the mounting signals. This is all very scary. This is where the media (that “liberal media”) fail us miserably. Bill Moyers and NOW gave us a sobering look at what was publically available, but which the media basically abandoned to pursue what they apparently thought was “sexier” fare.