Josh Marshall highlighted the unusual step CNN took with a poll about Barack Obama’s patriotism yesterday, concluding with a warning:

That’s how it works. Starts at right-swing smear sites and hoax emails. Then the AP’s Nedra Pickler, who specializes in scooping up this slop and laundering it into the mainstream press, writes it up for the AP that runs across the country. And then picks it up and makes it a regular part of the campaign conversation.

I doubt some top exec at CNN came up with this or any name anchor. It’s some producer in the bowels of the operation. But it amounts to the same thing because it’s part of the culture and there’s no accountability.

Get ready for more.

Extreme nationalism is always common among many simpletons during a time of war. We’ve come a ways from death threats to three Dixie Chicks, because one criticized a President who now has history’s lowest approval rating, and nearly every blogger, musician, entertainer and elected Democratic critical of the war has been called a traitor or worse.

The Fourth Estate, whose historical role is to keep a critical eye on government officials and to work its way past spin and propaganda, has largely surrendered its responsibility in the past quarter century, especially television reporters trained to be entertainers more than journalists. Like Josh said “get ready for more”.

Though critical analysis of the Wars in Afghanistan and especially Iraq has been on the upswing, now that we’re back into a presidential election year, the backsliding has begun as that broadcast media pursues a ridiculous and inconsequential matter like a lapel pin proving something or other, with minimal reportage of all the people dying and the overtly corrupt central government of Iraq, which the Bush administration continues to support and enable. How many elected representatives salute the flag draped coffins in person when our young men and women are returned to us without a voice to weigh in on the war, instead of a chunk of cheap jewelry likely made in China?

Meanwhile, to quote from the liner notes, “Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch, author of the definitive McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, gives the lowdown on what The New York Times got wrong in its expose of the presumptive GOP nominee’s seamy relationship to lobbyists” in the following video:
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That’s the type of scrutiny the broadcast media should be providing in reviewing the candidates. Billions of our dollars, our lives and our nation’s security depend on us knowing the truth about each of the candidates. And for far too long, John McCain has been one of its favored sons, like George Bush used to be, escaping scrutiny for his continual ties with lobbyists and his resulting efforts for them that gives the impression he’s been bought and owned throughout his Senatorial career, going back to the Keating Five scandal.

Meanwhile, while quickly shunting that story aside, in the past 8 days, we’ve been treated to a steady parade of negative charges against Obama, most of them proven false: he’s never been a Muslim, respects the flag, sings the national anthem, leads others in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, has in no way coddled enemies of our country (foreign and domestic), and his wife loves the country, too. Because she gushed out about her pride without carefully parsing her word selection, rightists were quick to denounce her as an anti-American ingrate. And because Barack overlooked an attribution to a rallying speech passage his friend suggested he use, he was derided as a plagiarist, aka: a cheat.

None of the weak claims cost any lives, hurt national security, cost us any money, made our jobs and economy less secure or had any negative effect on any American. None indicated he’d sold out to business lobbyists. In more than a year of intense scrutiny, his very limited ties to a guy eventually convicted of crimes yielded the fact that the felon had donated the paltry sum of $200 to his campaign way back in 2001. Proving what, exactly?

That’s all the media has unearthed on him, yet it continues to adopt Rightist spin games to suggest his integrity and character are suspect, while ignoring a few boatloads of evidence that it’s John McCain with rotting skeletons visible in his closet.

Is there a single major TV network with a newsroom full of journalists with any sense of balance? None that run advertising meet the standard of the old Fourth Estate, which has, itself become a rotted skeleton in a closet emanating odors terribly foul.

(h/t to Avedon Carol for directing me to the Matt Welch video. For anyone unaware, Matt Welch is a Libertarian whose political journal blogging makes him among a handful of the medium’s pioneers years before Atrios and Kos and Josh and others began. He and Ken Layne may have been the first two of the political blogging pioneers).