The Convenient Termination of Dr. Dean

By Dan Hagen

Sometimes a single example is sufficient to summarize the compromise, cowardice and corruption of the corporate news media.

Case in point: Howard Dean’s “scream.”

Dean once made a funny noise in the middle of a screaming rally, and was instantly and universally declared unfit for office by the corporate media that looped it, amplified it and replayed it incessantly.

The so-called “scream” was shown some 633 times by cable and broadcast news networks in just four days following the incident, and that doesn’t include talk shows and local news broadcasts. But those in the actual audience that day said they were not aware of the infamous “scream.”

Yet people like the right-wing extremist quitter Sarah Palin and her loony counterpart Michele Bachmann constantly made inane, fact-free, ludicrous remarks, and were sagely discussed as serious presidential contenders. Their batshit-crazy pronouncements were made to vanish down the memory hole as soon as they babbled them. The corporate media is willing to treat Palin as a credible candidate when they know, through indisputable documented interviews, that she is in fact a cretin.

Diane Sawyer and others in the national broadcast news media later expressed “some regret” about the Dean story. CNN issued a public apology and admitted in a statement that they indeed may have “overplayed” the incident.

Gee, ya think? CNN’s “apology” was cover to save face after the hatchet job was done. America’s corporate masters wanted the most liberal candidate in the presidential race eliminated, and released their corporate media hounds to run him off.

It's a magic trick. The corporate media made the American left disappear, with a puff of back-room smoke and the sound of Dr. Dean making a “funny noise.”

Remember, we went to war to stop weapons that didn't exist, except in the fever dreams of the White House and the corporate media. Dean’s “gaffe” was equally nonexistent, except on the tube.

Working in concert, corporate media manipulators can make anything seem to happen, or unhappen.

And so, being dishonest, they do.