Bill Moyers, in a speech before the Society of Professional Journalists, offerred his much-heralded insight into the obsession for secrecy of modern government. Some highlights:

• President Bush’s chief of staff ordered a review that lead to 6,000 documents being pulled from government Web sites.
• The Department of Defense banned photos of military caskets being returned to the United States.
• Vice President Dick Cheney kept his energy task force records secret “to hide the influence of Kenneth Lay, Enron and other energy moguls.”
• The CIA asks a new question during its standard employer polygraph exam: “Do you have friends in the media?”
• “There have been more than 1,200 presumably terrorist-related arrests,” Moyers said, “and 750 people deported, and no one outside the government knows their names or how many court docket entries have been erased or never entered.”
• Secret federal court hearings have been held without any public record of when or where, or who was tried.
• When the American Civil Liberties Union challenged provisions of the Patriot Act, it was prohibited from telling anyone about it.
• The Washington Post reported that in recent years, judicial committees acting in secret stripped information nearly 600 times from reports intended to alert the public to conflicts of interest involving federal judges.

“By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind, they hoped to panic us into abandoning those unique freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of the press – that constitute the ability of democracy to self-correct and turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg.” The greatest moments in the history of the press, Moyers said, “came not when journalists made common cause with the state, but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.”

And what is surely to become a classic quote held in reverence by principled journalists everywhere:

Moyers said, “…what’s important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality.”

David Cole writes for The Nation that the Justice Department’s war on domestic terrorism is pitifully unproductive.

On September 2 a federal judge in Detroit threw out the only jury conviction the Justice Department has obtained on a terrorism charge since 9/11. In October 2001, shortly after the men were initially arrested, Attorney General John Ashcroft heralded the case in a national press conference as evidence of the success of his anti-terror campaign.

With the dismissal of these charges, there has not been a single conviction on terrorism in the U.S.

It was bound to happen. The media is doing such a bad job of investigating, analyzing, and delivering the news, that even Investor’s Business Daily is touting the oft-maligned blogosphere for their journalistic prowess.

In the same way the market sifts and analyzes information stocks far better than any individual investor or institution ever could, the blogosphere weeds out the chaff and develops and hones analysis and facts at, well, Internet speed.

For a medium that has become synonymous with incredulity, this is a big step. It was not long ago (I think, yesterday), that if you told someone you got your facts from the Internet you would be subjected to a heavy sigh and severe rolling of the eyes. Now the same source is being hailed as CBS’ fact checker.

We have to be careful here. Obviously I would like to promote the concept that accurate and insightful information is available in the blog community. But this community is no more accurate today than it was yesterday, and discretion is still the watchword. Now that the value and power of Internet punditry is being recognized, it is important that this recognition is served up to the deserving and not dished out indiscriminately. There are still alot of antennae-heads out there. This is, however, a step in the right direction. The mainstream media has got to watch it’s back. There’s a new sheriff in town.

AdWeek is reporting that the environment for election ads may be altering course.

…due to the 60-day window, all ads must now be financed using “hard” money and be subject to party- and candidate-ad rules, including claiming responsibility for the message in the creative–or face further restrictions.

The 527s have been a persistent peculiarity in recent weeks. Surrogates on both sides of the political spectrum have used them to whack their opponenent. This has not, however, been conducted with moral equivalency on each side. Joshuah Bearman of the LA Weekly writes:

Contrary to the dogma of J[ournalism] schools across the country, there are not always two sides to a story. Balance is often necessary and indispensable, but there are times when the media might have to…mediate a bunch of information and make a judgment. And in those instances, presenting contrasting information as if it’s equally important is, in fact, the false representation…..don’t quote people who are lying just to have “both sides” represented.

However, the attempts by Bush, and to a lesser extent, Kerry, to do away with 527s is a bit disconcerting. There are ever fewer outlets for political speech, particularly speech that eminates from the grassroots. Certainly many of the 527s are not grassroots outfits, but they have the potential to be. The more enlightened approach would be to tinker with the statute so that it promotes citizen participation and disallows the sponsoship of vested interests.

Now even the pre-eminent mouthpiece for the entertainment industry is awash in the revelation that the media is virtually incapable of tolerating dissenting views. This is particularly true when those views are contrary to the interests of their corporate owners.

From the article:

Not only were hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in New York dismissed or downplayed last week by the media … but the parent companies of the media are becoming increasingly reluctant to go out on a limb about anything controversial.

The mainstream press acheived lows embarrassing even for them. With reports of demonstrator attendance as high as 500,000, there was still precious little coverage of substance. While they did liberally cover some of the goofy charactors that show up at these events (in a transparent effort to trivialize the entire protest community), they managed to avoid entirely the thousands of protesters that participated in the March on the Media. It may be too much to expect that they would cover events critical of themselves, but their negligence extends to anything that generates a hint of controversy.

The New York Times addresses an interesting question with regard to news staying “fresh”.

With such saturation coverage, news gets used up faster, decaying rapidly into what Russell Baker calls “the olds.” Public curiosity, let alone the public interest, is exhausted, and the mass media are quick to look for some new sensation even if that means leaving important issues unresolved.

They may be on to something. However, the opposite can also be observed as some stories, of relatively trivial nature, can get stuck in the cycle long after their usefulness as news has expired (i.e. Condit/Levy, Britney’s marriage, etc.)