Frank Rich: What's Missing from the News

Is it me or is Brian Williams the most self-unaware tool of big corporate America? He actually winces as he reports the banal, irrelevant news of the day, so perhaps he has some awareness of how useless he is to the American people. And Gannon is now claiming he's the victim of a gay-bashing leftist witchhunt. What?! He's the witchhunter (or was). Well, at least this gives us some hope that the truth will come to light in the American public's conciousness:

t r u t h o u t - Frank Rich: What's Missing from the News: "We still don't know how this Zelig, using a false name, was given a daily White House pass every day for two years. Last weekend, Jim Pinkerton, a former official in the Reagan and Bush I White Houses, said on 'Fox News Watch,' no less, that such a feat 'takes an incredible amount of intervention from somebody high up in the White House' and that 'some investigation should proceed and they should find that out.'
Given an all-Republican government, the only investigation possible will have to come from the press. Which takes us back to 1972, the year of Thompson's fear and loathing on the campaign trail. That was no golden age for news either. As Thompson's Rolling Stone colleague, Timothy Crouse, wrote in his own chronicle of that year, 'The Boys on the Bus,' months of stories by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein failed to 'sink in' and only 48 percent of those polled by Gallup had heard of Watergate by Election Day.
Some news organizations had simply ignored The Post's scoops 'out of petty rivalry,' Crouse wrote. Others did so because they 'feared the administration or favored Nixon in the presidential race.' Others didn't initially recognize the story's importance. (The New York Times played the Watergate break-in on page 30.) According to a superb new history of the Washington press corps, 'Reporting from Washington,' by Donald Ritchie, even Rather, then CBS's combative man in the Nixon White House, 'left the Watergate story alone at first, sure that it would fade like 'a puff of talcum powder.'' "