The fawning, lapdog Washington press corps

Colbert & the Courtier Press
By Robert Parry
from Consortiumnews.com
May 5, 2006

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has joined the swelling ranks of big-name journalists outraged over comedian Stephen Colbert’s allegedly rude performance, offending George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on April 29.

“Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude,” Cohen wrote. “Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person’s sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.”

...

Over the past several years, as Bush asserted unlimited presidential powers and implemented policies that have led the United States into the business of torture and an unprovoked war in Iraq, Washington journalists mostly stayed on the sidelines or actively assisted the administration, often wrapping its extraordinary actions in a cloak of normality designed more to calm than alert the public. At such a dangerous moment, when a government is committing crimes of state, politeness is not necessarily a virtue.

So, average Americans are growing more and more agitated because too often in the past five years they have watched the national press act more like courtiers to a monarch than an independent, aggressive Fourth Estate. This fawning style of the Washington media continued into the April 29 dinner.

(The rest is here.)