Oh the Hypocrisy

I've been scratching my head a bit about the venom being spewed by those on the right regarding The New York Times and its recent article about the U.S. government's tactics in monitoring financial records in the hope of finding terrorists. The story seemed pretty tame. I mean, did anyone think the government was NOT doing what it was doing? If the government is monitoring our library usage, surely it is monitoring our financial records. Our sad fact of life is that the Bush Administration IS Big Brother. So the piece by the Times wasn't even news.

But it does prove the point of my post of last week. People seriously think we have a liberal media? You have a newspaper simply doing its job--doing what all newspapers should do if they employ halfway competent journalists--and the organization gets blasted by the government, half of America and many other "news" outlets (more like propoganda outlets in the case of FOX).

Jon Friedman makes some good points about how opponents are whining that the Times is unpatriotic in his recent column.

Conservatives sure liked the Times when "reporter" Judy Miller was a mouthpiece for the Bush Administration and the government's lies about Iraq in the days before the war there. Remember how patriotic the Times was then? Funny how patriotism seems to shift according to whether you agree with a newspaper or not.

Did you know that the Dean of Library Services at University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, canceled the library's subscription to the New York Times Wednesday to protest recent stories exposing a secret government program that monitors international financial transactions in the hunt for terrorists? Apparently the Times' words are not incarnate.

And the hypocrisy of this whole liberal media thing comes up in this piece by Greg Sargent.

If it weren't so truly frightening to see our democracy and freedoms crumble all around us, it would be downright funny. Wow, was George Orwell truly prophetic, or what? This BuzzFlash commentary from today really drives the point home!