by Ari Rutenberg

The American media, already not much more than a shill for the corporate and political elites with little spine or stomach for genuine confrontation with power, has now abandoned its obligation as the representatives of the fourth estate. They have, in their search for 'ratings' and 'content', or perhaps in complicity with those who seek to prolong the Iraq war, completely overlooked one of the most significant veteran's protests since the Vietnam war.

It is the Winter Soldier II conference sponsored by the IVAW (Iraq Vets Against the War)

which is a gather of over 200 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan

conflicts who have come not simply to speak about the war but also to

tell their personal stories and to share their pain and internal

conflict about the nature of these wars. It has not been covered by

the MSM. When one does a Google news search for "Winter Soldier II"

there are no hits from the MSM on the first page, though the first hit

is about an article from Human Events, the conservative standard

bearer. In fact the first even close to mainstream outlet to cover it

is the Des Moines Register, and they're only important during the Iowa

caucuses. When I searched directly on the MSM websites, both CNN and

the "liberal" NY Times had no coverage. The closest they came was a

few articles on John Kerry and the original Winter Soldier

conference after Vietnam from the 2004 election. The only large media

outlets to have coverage were Yahoo! news and MSNBC, though even that

was an article sourced from the Washington Post.

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They have now become a completely owned and operated wing of the

asshole party. They will cover Kerry's involvment in the first Winter

Soldier as a huge controversy 30 years later even though it turned out

those boys were all telling the absolute truth, but not a similar

conference going on right now about a war thats going on right now

because I guess it conflicts with the interests of their advertisers

(though why Dove soap cares about the Iraq war I'll never know). And

since the media is granted its freedoms to protect the interests of the

third estate (the people), and they have now become a subsidiary of the

second estate (in old Europe that was the landed gentry and

aristocracy) they no longer need to be protected from the law since

they represent it. We need new media. Not just blogs and little

outlets, but major media sources which millions of people who don't

know how to use the internet can access. There is no other way to

combat this assault on our freedom by the press. But who among us with

the resources will be strong enough to find such an outlet? So far the

closest is PBS' Bill Moyers, but even he barely makes a dent in the

viewers of CNN or MSNBC or Limbaugh or Savage or Malkin. Without a

truly free and cynical fourth estate, I don't know if our democracy can

survive.