Monday, May 16, 2005

Today is Cynicism Day: It's nice to come into work dog tired on a Monday morning and find out that the news media has once again destroyed its credibility by maliciously attacking America's credibility, and that blogs are putting their credibility on the line to play up the charges.

In the great scheme of things, Newsweek's major wholesale fuck-up of news judgment and of minimum journalistic standards and accuracy isn't that big of a deal. Yes, people died as a result of the riots. But in this war-torn region, nothing is going to stop them from killing each other. And yes, falsely making the U.S. government look bad does not help the safety of our troops. But the same people who will attack our troops over this would have used any other excuse to carry out jihad against our bravest.

It's not like our reputation in the Middle East was stellar to begin with. Sure, in some places -- such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Iran -- the U.S. is becoming more popular. But it's still safer to say you're from Canada.

Judging from the blogosphere, people are only seeing what they want to see in this story. Conservatives are ranting against the MSM for screwing up yet again, blowing what's left of its credibility, hating our troops, attacking Bush, only reporting the bad news -- did I leave anything out?

Liberals, who enjoyed the Newsweek story when it first came out, are strangely quiet. Hell, some are still trying to find a few shreds of evidence that the overall thrust of the story is true. Fake but accurate, redux.

This was a sad, pathetic attempt by Newsweek to beat its competition in unfairly smearing the U.S. government. Hell, it wouldn't have been that big of a deal if the accusations were true. I would have been more curious as to exactly how they were able to flush the entire Koran down the toilet. Some people tend to think that our troops are systematically torturing and violating the captives from our War on Terrorism. From what I've seen so far, we're dealing with little more than a few bad apples, not some Bush-Cheney conspiracy.

I don't have a scorecard available, but liberals have apparently lost a point in the "Bush is Evil" category now that the reports are found to be false, and conservatives have gained another point for "The Liberal Media Hates America". Honestly, this competition bored me a long time ago.