Lamenting the "Late, Great Press"

Chris Hedges recently published a wonderful column over at TruthDig that is well worth your time if you "hate today's Media." In this, Hedges absolutely nails the dysfunction in our Versailles on the Potomac:

"When reporting depends heavily on access it becomes very difficult to challenge those who grant or deny that access. This craven desire for access has turned huge sections of the Washington press, along with most business reporters, into courtiers. The need to be included in press briefings and background interviews with government or business officials, as well as the desire for leaks and early access to official documents, obliterates journalistic autonomy."

And with this, Hedges rightly identifies why (and how) it is so easy to mislead the Citizens in today's USA:

"Or is the public, as Walter Lippmann wrote, now so deeply uninformed and divorced from the inner workings of power and diplomacy as to make it a clean slate on which our armies of skilled propagandists can, often through the press, leave a message? "

As they say, read it all.