Steve Coll at Goldman Sachs Awards
How much additional evidence is really needed at this point to show that the establishment media are courtiers to power not independent journalists? Well, here is a little more anyway.
According to Michael Calderone at the Huffington Post, President Barack Obama met with over a dozen “journalists” in an off-the-record meeting to get input on how he should sell his war against ISIS to the American people.
Previous to the HuffPo story only the New York Times lightly mentioned the meeting but never disclosed the attendees. The off-the-record meeting between journalists and policymakers will likely symbolize to many observers the incestuous and corrupt relationship between the government and the mainstream media where friends are made, favors are traded, and truth gets buried.
The group, which met in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in an off-the-record session, included New York Times columnists David Brooks, Tom Friedman and Frank Bruni and editorial writer Carol Giacomo; The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, Eugene Robinson and Ruth Marcus; The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins and George Packer; The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and Peter Beinart; The New Republic’s Julia Ioffe; Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll; The Wall Street Journal’s Jerry Seib; and The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, a source familiar with the meeting told The Huffington Post.
The dean of the Columbia School of Journalism is a nice touch or really the finishing touch on the all too familiar picture of insider discussion and dealing between government and media elites. Why would such a meeting even need to be off-the-record? Is this a group of independent journalists or the president’s communications staff?
Not surprisingly, the speech President Obama gave after meeting with the group of “journalists” was inaccurate, hyperbolic, and manipulative. Apparently no one told Obama to just be straight with the American people and tell the truth, but then why would you need to be off-the-record to give that advice?
Photo by Puramyun31 under Creative Commons license.
