“Archduke Ferdinand found alive: World War unnecessary.” The spoof headline from the 1930s neatly sums up the attitude of the baying pack of journalistic hounds who have been on the hopeful trail of presidential wrongdoing since my last look at the media in mid-May. After a month of attending--though only with half an ear--to the incessant self-questioning of pundits and reporters about the possibilities of distributing blame for the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction, I could take it no longer and left the country for a month in Central America, almost out of range of the medias agonizing. When I came back, the media were still discussing the possibilities of distributing blame for the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction, but had narrowed their focus to the possibilities of distributing blame for the specific assertion in the last State of the Union Address that British intelligence suspected Saddam Hussein of having tried to get uranium f ...
James Bowman is the author of Honor: A History (Encounter Books) and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, also published by Encounter (2008)
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 21 July 2003, on page 0
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