Iraq Winter Soldier Hearings Show Weakness of Independent Media
Jeff Cohen — full disclosure: he used to be my boss and is a friend — makes some very valid and important points in ““Iraq Winter Soldier Hearings: Victory for Independent Media.”
But there is another way of looking at this.
The fact that the mainstream paid so little attention to Winter Soldier — as well countless other worthy stories — is itself a failure of independent media to propel those stories into the mainstream…
The great success of Fox News Channel is not that it has done what it has done, but that it has influenced the “mainstream” as it has.
And in that sense, independent media has totally failed.
To take the example at hand, what we did not see in the last several weeks was independent media asking questions about Winter Soldier at the White House press conferences, or at the Pentagon or State Department. Had they done so, the administration spokesperson’s words would likely have led to more attention to Winter Soldier than all the work of all the people who labored on it for months…
But no one asked at the news conferences, so none of that happened.
BY TOM TOMORROW