What follows is my take on this, from personal observation, not linking to evidence (that is a real project) but I think a fair and factual appraisal of what happened.
It appears to me that what Bob Somerby is discussing, and what Kevin's strawman (with Shafer) avoids is the uptick in media incompetence through the 1990s. "What a coincidence?" you might say. The Media started to suck when Clinton was President. Well, yes and no. Let me state an apostasy sure to ban me from liberal paradise: There was, in the partisan conventional political sense -- a liberal bias in the Media against Republicans and conservatives in the 1970s through the late 1980s. (My explanation of why I think so is Note 1 in extended) Not in the progressive radical sense of course.
But when Clinton started his rise to prominence in 1992, this all changed, and in the strangest way at first. Most of it was personal, not policy. Indeed, on policy, Clinton was one of the least COVERED Presidents in history. There are alot of reasons for that but I think David Brock has his finger on it better than anyone else.
Because from Clinton's time, the Right Wing Smearers, the Swifties of their time, went from just bitching at the Media, to actually creating stories for the Media. Much of the Mighty Wurlitzer we see today was transformed into the story churners we now know - then it was The Spectator, The Moonie Times, Limbaugh and finally, the piece de resistance - Roger Ailes' Fox News Channel.
And THAT is when the actual QUALITY as well as a real anti-Dem bias in the Media came to be. Because not only was the Wurlitzer bleating about the SCLM, not only were they creating and feeding stories about the Clintons, all viciously personal, almost never about policy (gays in the military and health care being the only 2, and the Right's first successful destruction of fair reporting in a major way.), they now had their own news outlets, with the Kingpin kicking ratings ass and taking names.
The other critical factor? The New York Times and its Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines, may he burn in hell. Raines HATED Clinton. I still have no idea why. Raines' hatred spilled into the news pages, Jeff Gerth anyone, and from there to the whole of the Establishment Media. The endless investigations began and voila Ken Starr replaces Robert Fisk. The rest is history.
The Media became, almost overnight, simply horrible. Unfair, incompetent, shallow and harmful. And continue so to this day.
Not only did it become a cowed biased press, even if it tried to be fair, the best it could muster was "he said, she said" journalism. I defy anyone to describe the journalism practiced from 1994 to the present day as better than any other period after World War II. No fucking way.
And Bob Somerby's points, or so it seems to me, are exactly that. I don't think Somerby has ever made a comparison of today's journalism with any mythical Golden Age. I know we don't. But Bob and I remember the press PRIOR to 1994, and it was many degrees better, at its worst, than the last 11 years.
Take one example: a comparison of the runup to Desert Storm with the coverage of the Iraq Debacle. First, in Desert Storm, Iraq had INVADED a sovereign nation and was threatening Saudi Arabia with a huge well equipped Army. Bush 41 went to the UN, built a true coalition that included even Arab countries, including SYRIA, gave Saddam many outs, and tried to avoid war up until January 9, when Tariq Aziz refused to take Bush's letter to Saddam. And still the Media was skeptical and covered Bush 41 critically, questioning "the rush to war" - the failure to "give sanctions a chance" - the huge protests against the war.
For the Iraq Debacle the press was nothing but cheerleaders for a trumped up war with a toothless dictator who had threatened NO ONE, much less invaded a country. No coverage of protests. No fair view of those who opposed the war. Indeed, war opposers, even in Congress were basically sneered at. As disgraceful a performance as I have ever seen in my life. They should be filled with shame. Was it 9/11? Maybe a little. But mostly it was the beatdown the Right had given them for 30 years and the Wurlitzer. And yes, The New York Times and that bastard Howell Raines.
So no the Press is not better. It is markedly worse.
That the Media was cowed after 9/11 is undoubtedly true. But the bigger story ito me is that the Media was largely incompetent for a decade before that.
