Despite ongoing efforts to convince people things are going well, people know they aren't

The president's approval rating continues to fall. This is from a few days ago. I flagged the article but am just coming back to it now. But this really is a continuing, developing story that is the basis for much of what we are seeing in the political news and in how the political news is reported.

More and more people have become aware that the perception they have had about the direction the country was headed, and perhaps in particular the success of the war on terror, was based on an administration public relations construct rather than on reality. That realization is behind the falling poll numbers. It is also behind the story about the fake teleconference that Bush had with some troops in Iraq that was in the news in the past week and and which I posted about a few days ago. This story would not have been reported had the presidents approval rating been at 60%.

But now it is becoming not only acceptable, but perhaps even fashionable, for the media to turn on the administration. We can now even see media personalities who are not exactly known as critically thinking, fact finding journalists (Matt Lauer pops to mind) asking The Leader tough questions. This trend can't bode well for the administration, but it is also important for us to realize what it shows us about the media.

The administration had their attempt to manufacture news with the teleconferecne called out last week most of the mainstream media. But this type thing has been standard operating procedure for the adminstration since before they were an adminstration. The trip to Iraq for serving turkey and the bogus reports of near detection by a British Airways plane to add suspense to the trip come to mind as a classic example. But only bits of this were reported by some of the media as being staged. No one really put the whole things together and called it for what is was, a complete media stunt. And most of the country were blissfully unaware any of it was staged.

So now the mainstream media is making some efforts to actually report facts rather than to be mindless sycophants of the administration. But make no mistake, up until very recently, most of the media have been active collaborators in the adminstrations efforts to control public opinion by the distortion of facts regarding the results of their policies. The adminstration's public relations construct of an effective policy in the war on terror would not have been possible without an complacent media community, unwilling or unable to report the objective facts rather than the politically generated "fact system" created by the administration to bolster their political support.

The old adage, "better late than never", is still true. But it is of little comfort that the media is only starting, and let's emphasize starting here, to do their job at this point in time. Thousands of our troops have died in Iraq and the good-will and support received after September 11 from around the world has not been used to further the war on terror but rather squandered by invading the wrong country. We could have used some help from the media in critically analysing our activities before that happened. Instead we got public relations and cheerleading from them. It's a god damn shame.