Lies, Sex, and a sad lack of Daily Show videotape

Glenn Greenwald keeps up the good fight, expecting journalists to pursue factual truth (and to call authorities on their BS) rather than merely pass on both "sides" of a debate as is both were mere opinions, even when one side is factually correct and the other is bogus.

This failure to takes sides with the truth, in an attempt to maintain a faux "objectivity" leads to the media passing on government (and opposition) propaganda, lending it the appearance of truth. This applies especially with the media’s refusal to call actions taken by Americans "torture," even when Americans have prosecuted others (as torturers) for committing those identical acts (such as waterboarding) and even as those same media describe as torture those same, or essentially identical, acts carried out by other nations.

In one of his many articles on this topic, Greenwald quotes this juicily hilarious extract from a satirical discussion on an August 2004 Daily Show between Jon Stewart and Daily Show "reporter" Rob Corddry (and I’m sorry I don’t have any video):

Stewart: Here’s what puzzles me most, Rob. John Kerry’s record in Vietnam is pretty much right there in the official records of the U.S. military, and hasn’t been disputed for 35 years.

Corddry: That’s right, Jon, and that’s certainly the spin you’ll be hearing coming from the Kerry campaign over the next few days.

Stewart: That’s not a spin thing, that’s a fact. That’s established.

Corddry: Exactly, Jon, and that established, incontrovertible fact is one side of the story.

Stewart: But isn’t that the end of the story? I mean, you’ve seen the records, haven’t you? What’s your opinion?

Corddry: I’m sorry, "my opinion"? I don’t have opinions. I’m a reporter, Jon, and my job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called "objectivity" — might want to look it up some day.

Stewart: Doesn’t objectivity mean objectively weighing the evidence, and calling out what’s credible and what isn’t?

Corddry: Whoa-ho! Sounds like someone wants the media to act as a filter! Listen, buddy: Not my job to stand between the people talking to me and the people listening to me.

Hilarious and very, very sad, especially that candidate Kerry may well have lost a presidency because the media largely uncritically passed on lies about his war record.

It occurred to me that, given the rash of adulterous relationships coming to light involving GOP politicians, that soon we’d have GOP spokespeople avoiding the use of the word "adultery" and instead using some other more harmless term, which could then be used to confuse the issue. Then I remembered a post-Sanford column by conservative columnist David Brooks trying to do something that approaches that:

On Sanford himself, I’ve tried and failed to make the point that we need new words for adultery and extramarital affairs. It seems to me there are at least two types of adulteries and we misleadingly lump them together. There is the one-night-stand sort of adultery — the guy who wanders off with a series of youngish women so he can feel like a dashing playboy. Then there is the deeply-in-love sort of adultery.

Both types represent a betrayal of the family, of course. Sanford wasn’t just cheating on his wife. He was cheating on his children.

But I confess I think less harshly of people who commit adultery No. 2 than adultery No. 1. At least they are in search of something transcendent. They are in the grip of an addiction-like behavior.

See, Sanford wasn’t such a bad guy. He was deeply in love and in search of something transcending the mundane, stultifying, boringness of a conventional marriage. And it’s not even an addiction, but just "addiction-like." He’s almost noble, in a way.

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