Newsweek is the latest U.S. news outlet to be slapped into the stocks for sloppy journalism, pelted with criticism for a story alleging American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed a Koran down a toilet. But the case also underscores the fact that some stories are politically riskier than others - especially if they upset the Bushes, according to this report by Robert Parry of Consortiumnews.com.

But possibly a more dangerous consequence of the story is that it will reinforce the growing perception in Washington journalism that the fastest way to ruin your career is to write something that gets you on the wrong side of George W. Bush and his administration. That means there could be even less critical reporting about the War on Terror and the Iraq War.

Arguably the gullible U.S. reporting about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-03 contributed to more death and destruction than the Koran story did, including more than 1,600 dead American soldiers. But no one news organization has faced the condemnation that Newsweek has for its mistake.

Already some right-wing media critics are citing the Newsweek case as proof of dishonest “liberal” journalism, even though top Newsweek editors often have sided with conservative or neoconservative foreign policy agendas. They certainly did during my three years at the magazine when Editor Maynard Parker regularly lined up with Reagan-Bush policymakers.

Hmmm. The liberal press. Right.

Sitting up late blogging and watching C-SPAN, I managed to catch the speech by Bill Moyers taking on the media and the government at the conference put on by a non-profit group called Free Press, “working to involve the public in media policymaking and to craft policies for more democratic media,” according to its mission statement.

I may as well publish my own book on the press now, since the Newsweek debacle will make it even harder to do or sell any meaningful investigative journalism for some time to come.

Meanwhile, the MSM thinks it can stop the bleeding circulation numbers and the plummeting public trust in public opinion polls by covering more church. What a joke.

At least there’s one newsman on TV willing to take on a sycophant like Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman who let gay male prostitute Jeff Gannon in the press room and who is now blaming Newsweek for deaths in the Middle East and diminishing America’s reputation in the world. I think someone needs to look in the damn mirror.

Keith Olbermann is calling on McClellan to resign. It won’t happen, of course, but at least someone has the guts to say it out loud in front of a camera.

Is the American press as we know it doomed - along with 229 years of experimentation with Democracy?

Let us all now bow down and give praise to famous men, right? Shouldn’t we all just be grateful for the crumbs they throw us?

I already know one real reporter who recently had to take a job as a grocery store checkout clerk just to feed her family. We’ll all be working for Wal-Mart soon - if a lot of people don’t by dog stand up and protest the direction we are headed.

It’s just a damn good thing the Republican Party decided a long time ago that presidential terms should be limited to two in the wake of FDR’s four terms during The Depression and World War II. Otherwise, the organized religious forces in this country might just anoint George W. Bush king for life and we could kiss this great experiment in Democracy good bye.

The good news is, there will be more elections in 2006 and 2008. There is some chance that the libertarian independents might just split from the religious conservatives and help the pendulum to swing back and allow a few more Democrats back into power.

Otherwise, dear friends, Hunter S. Thompson may prove right to lament the death of the American Dream. It sure seems to be slipping away these days. It’s hard to even muster a decent “ho, ho.”

Bill Moyers denounced the politcal right and top officials at the White House for trying to silence their critics by controlling the news media, according to this report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

He also took aim at reporters who become little more than willing government “stenographers,” the Dispatch reports. And he said the public increasingly is content with just enough news to confirm its own biases.

Moyers, whose reports have appeared on the Public Broadcasting System since the 1970s, spoke in St. Louis at a conference on media reform. He is a former newspaper publisher and was an aide to President Lyndon Johnson in the early 1960s.

Moyers said those in power - government officials and their allies in the media - mean to stay there by punishing journalists “who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.”

Answering for the first time recent charges that public television in general and he in particular have become too liberal, Moyers described those officials as “obsessed with control” of the media. He said they are using the government “to threaten and intimidate.”

Those charges came from Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a Republican, who paid an outside consultant $10,000 to keep track of the political leanings of guests on Moyers’ show, “Now.” Moyers left the show last year but is back on public television as host of the series “Wide Angle.”

On the recommendation of administration officials, Tomlinson hired a senior White House aide to draw up guidelines to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts, according to a May 2 report in The New York Times.

Give ‘em hell Bill.

Hmmm. The press is generally liberal, Karl Rove said, according to this article in the Wasington Post. But, he said, “I think it’s less liberal than it is oppositional.”

Damn right.

“Reporters now see their role less as discovering facts and fair-mindedly reporting the truth and more as being put on the earth to afflict the comfortable, to be a constant thorn of those in power, whether they are Republican or Democrat,” Rove said.

His indictment of the media - delivered as part of Washington College’s Harwood Lecture Series, named for the late Washington Post editor and writer Richard Harwood - had four parts: that there’s been an explosion in the number of media outlets; that these outlets have an insatiable demand for content; that these changes create enormous competitive pressure; and that journalists have increasingly adopted an antagonistic attitude toward public officials.

Beyond that, Rove argued that the press pays too much attention to polls and “horse-race” politics, and covers governing as if it were a campaign.

I’m wondering what the conservative bloggers over at Press Think think of that? It should shut them up but, of course, it won’t.

GW