I’m copying the whole of this post by Atrios because I think he really hits it as to what has changed fundamentally now about many American’s relationship to the news media…

In the post below I had meant to prominently include the 2000 election recount/selection as a cause of a major online lefty boom. While that was the time when I began to turn to the web for news/perspectives I couldn’t find elsewhere, it wasn’t actually until the inauguration that I finally concluded that something was seriously messed up, and that the problem was the media. I never had any illusions that Supreme Court Justices were noble people above reproach or that politicians could be trusted. I did at some point, however, have the sense that the mainstream media – CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, network news – while imperfect wasn’t completely broken. It was the coverage of the inauguration that did it for me.

You may remember that this was a cold and rainy day, truly miserable. Nonetheless thousands of protesters had gathered. However, most Americans would have no idea this was happening. Switching back and forth between coverage by the television networks, and the somewhat more raw footage carried by C-SPAN, it was apparent just how much effort the networks were expending to hide this fact from their viewing public. They would frequently cut away from the parade, provide odd camera angles, and do anything to maintain the illusion that the coronation was proceeding blissfully. The following day, for its inauguration coverage, the New York Times published a photo of George W. Bush walking the parade route. As discussed in Dennis Loy Jonson’s The Big Chill, this was an entirely staged photo. Bush had been unable to follow in the tradition established by Carter and carried on Ronald Reagan, Bush’s father, and Bill Clinton. The presence of the protesters prevented this, and it wasn’t until after Bush had left the public parade route, and was behind a barrier, that he could briefly hop out of the limousine and wave for the cameras. The Times had established a practice which impacted much of the media’s reporting on the activities of the Bush administration. They signaled a willingness to report things not as they necessarily were but as the administration wished to present them.

Emphasis above are mine.  For me, the moment when I finally came to the conclusion that something is seriously messed up and the problem is the media, came at the tail end of a slow steady accumulation of small observations that they were becoming part of the spin.  And that was preceded by many years of watching the quality of the news broadcasts getting thinner and thinner, as the right wing became more and more skilled at intimidating and undermining the press.

For decades, literally, I’d watched the news media cover the gay rights movement with that faux even handedness that demands that gutter crawling bigots be granted equal stature while on camera, even when it meant they could spread one filthy lie after another about gay and lesbian Americans without any of it being challenged as nonfactual, because to do so would be "taking sides" in a "controversial topic."  I’ve been writing here for years now that this behavior, this faux even handedness on the part of the news media was probably more painfully familiar to gay America then to straight.  Even so, my jaw kept dropping again and again during the Bush years, as staringly obvious Bush white house lies were simply passed along without comment by the press. 

I don’t know when exactly I’d finally concluded that the media had embedded themselves in the Bush spin machine, but the ghastly performance during MISSION ACCOMPLISHED day was what finally convinced me that they really were part of the problem.  As a gay man, all the fawning adoration of Bush’s "masculinity" on that carrier deck by the news media and the Washington pundocracy that day, and in the weeks that followed, struck me as…weird.  Very, very weird. 

The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.

He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics.

Compared to Karl Rove’s ”revvin’ up your engine” myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like ”Lizzie McGuire.”

This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.

–Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 4, 2003

…… 

MATTHEWS: What do you make of this broadside against the USS Abraham Lincoln and its chief visitor last week?

LIDDY: Well, I—in the first place, I think it’s envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man. And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know—and I’ve worn those because I parachute—and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those, run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn’t count—they’re all liars. Check that out. I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.

…..

MATTHEWS: Let’s go to this sub–what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo op in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I’ve got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on–onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I’m not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn’t do it for me personally, especially not when he’s in a suit, but he arrived there…

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: …he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn’t he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa–I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

It was only later I heard from other pilots that the usual thing is to take off your parachute harness once you’re out of the airplane.  But you knew he was deliberately calling attention to his genitals the moment you saw it.  Bush kept the parachute harness on and swaggered around that carrier deck in pure frat boy jock sneerage, like some alpha ape wagging his dong around looking for a fight after he’s just beaten the crap out of another poor ape half his size.  It was amazing.  Another time, it seemed long long ago, I might have been appalled.  But the longer its gone on, the more desensitized I’ve become to it.  There is a sizable portion of America that a man like that really does adequately represent.  And they really do enjoy making the rest of us flinch at the sight of that open sewer they call a conscience.

We are sexual beings, yes.  And brazen male sexuality can be an awesomely thrilling thing to behold.  This gay boy has beheld lots of defiantly brazen sexual posturing among human males.  But there is a difference when it’s meant to get you all hot and bothered and when it’s sneering and disdainful and meant only to intimidate and threaten.  And even then, even in the old human struggle for status and power and glory, the sexual posturing of the more recently evolved alpha males among us is more a subtext then a crude locker room joke.  But for those males among us with small frontal lobes, the sexual component of aggression takes center stage the minute the chest thumping begins.

"Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out."

It was always obvious what kind of man Bush was.  It was clear to me after November 2000 that there were enough people in this country just like him to take the nation straight into the gutter if the rest of us didn’t start fighting back hard, and quickly.  What really bothered me that day, and in the weeks that followed, was watching how many people in the mainstream news media were actually turned on by the sight of Bush swaggering around that carrier deck all but flashing his dick at the world…

I had the most astonishing thought last Thursday. After a long day of hauling the kids to playdates and ballet, I turned on the news. And there was the president, landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, stepping out of a fighter jet in that amazing uniform, looking–how to put it?–really hot. Also presidential, of course. Not to mention credible as commander in chief. But mostly "hot," as in virile, sexy and powerful.

-Lisa Schiffren, The Wall Street Journal 5/9/2003

So I’m watching all this gushing and fawning, all these media big shots getting the vapors over Junior’s Manly Characteristic, along with thugs like G. Gordon Liddy and I’m getting that same smarmy feeling I’ve had a time or two, stumbling onto something going on in the bathroom stalls at the back of some really seedy gay bar I’d been dragged into.  When sex gets dragged into the toilet you don’t know whether to cry or puke.  You just want to look away and get the hell out of there.  Except the shadowy figures in the toilet stalls have more dignity then these goddamned news media talking heads.  At least there is honest desire going on in there.  I watched the American news media having hot flashes over Bush all but wagging his dick at the world after he’d just started a war and I think that was when I knew that far too many media big shots nowadays were part of the same open sewer that Bush had risen from, and that was why they were cheering him on, why they thumped their chests for war too, why they hate democrats, why they treat all that bleeding heart liberal peace love and understanding stuff with sneering contempt.  It wasn’t that they were stupid.  It wasn’t that they’d been co-opted.  It was that the smirking boob really was their kind of guy. 

It’s not just the news media either.  Ever notice how, on the prime time TV cop shows, the good guys can threaten suspects and witnesses with prison rape unless they cooperate, and still remain good guys?