4th Quarter Dick Cheney Award for Corporate Malevolence Goes to US Corporate Media

It's embarrassing when a person is caught not doing his job.

It's even worse when it's revealed that not only hasn't the person in question been doing his job, but that someone else has.

The U.S. corporate media -- 4th quarter recipient of the Dick Cheney Award for Corporate Malevolence -- has been a lap dog for decades to the powerful, compromised, self-interested, anti-democracy, freedom-mocking establishment of the United States.

Renegade journalist, Greg Palast, put it in perspective in the Foreword to one of his books when he wrote about the myth of American investigative journalism, saying that the reporting of the Watergate story by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in the early 1970s was a one-off, a fluke -- such an anomaly that a movie was made about it.

Very true.

So, as CNN keeps its viewers abreast of developments occurring on Twitter and Facebook and the morbid circus on Fox News continues eating its own feces on air, as Dateline NBC -- in one of the most egregious abdications of journalistic responsibility -- devotes itself to solving 19 year old cold case murders, and ABC News and CBS News put on nightly displays of their irrelevance, there is Wikileaks.

Julian Assange and Wikileaks are heroes.

You can tell by the confederacy of dunces arrayed against them.

As Wolf Blitzer bloviates on the Canned News Network, worried about his State and corporate overlords doing a better job of protecting their fecund secrets, Julian Assange and Wikileaks is doing what a healthy and responsible journalist/news organization (though Assange and Wikileaks purports to be neither) should be doing: making the powerful elite walk through a full body scanner.

Since the American mind only responds to sports analogies, what's occurring right now between the United States government and Wikileaks is like a charity football game between a high school team and a Super Bowl winning NFL team.

The game is an utter mismatch.

Nobody, really, expects the NFL team to lose even a yard to high school team, and nobody expects the high school team to manage the least progress against the NFL team.

In the crowd for this game, you have the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Wolf Blitzer who heartily cheer-on the woefully under-matched NFL team.

Bill O'Reilly is such a scared rabbit of a person, he can only side with the school yard bully; he can only align himself with the powerful. Doesn't matter if the powerful is correct or has any moral justification for how it wields its power -- just being powerful is enough for O'Reilly's undying allegiance.

O'Reilly and his frightened, quivering ilk seek out power, subjugate themselves to it, ingratiate themselves to it, become the most saccharine, repellent sycophants to it. Then they puff up strawmen, like Wikileaks, making them sound like powerful entities, and cast himself as a dragon-slayer for going after them.

And so, you have many of the leading lights of the Culture of Life, anti-abortion contingent calling for the outright murder of Julian Assange. No due process. No trial.

Assange done wrong. Kill him! come their cries, as though from the apes in the opening of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Noam Chomsky rightly points out the response to the most recent Wikileaks relase reveals America's "profound hatred of democracy".

Democracy is to America what Bruce Springsteen is to my musical taste:

I like the idea of Springsteen, but I don't listen to his music.

America likes the idea of democracy, but when it really comes down to it, Americans prefer Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, Wal-Mart, McDonald's and a hundred other corporate overlords to look after their well-being.

No problem -- just stop crowing about freedom.

The Wikileaks release is a rebuke to power. That's what freedom's all about.

And it's not as though Julian Assange does this alone, or unscathed. He's been smeared from here to Timbuktu. He was brought up on rape charges in the summer and authorities are trying their luck again with that ruse.

American senators and urinalists are calling for Wikileaks to be designated a terrorist organization and Assange an enemy combatant.

Yeah, that's exercising freedom just as Thomas Jefferson envisioned it. Wince.

And who aids the powerful elites at every turn to get their message out, to ensure their spin keeps spinning? The US corporate media, which in a truth-telling world would be know for what it is: The US Ministry of Information.

For gross and ongoing dereliction of duty, from President Kennedy's assassination, through the Vietnam War, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy's assassinations, through Watergate, the Iran/Contra scandal that had all the potential to reveal wide-spread drug smuggling on the part of US intelligence, the invasion of Panama, Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma, the election debacle of 2000 (particularly for that, you skinned peckers), 911 through to the Wikileaks releases, the US corporate media richly and egregiously deserves the 4th Quarter Dick Cheney Award for Corporate Malevolence.

You have aided the wealthy against the weak.

You have abetted the powerful against the powerless.

You have squandered every opportunity to prove your relevance.

And gawddamn it, anyhow, Datelines, what's with all the 19 year old cold case murders? It's like a come-as-you-are-party for corpses.

You're in company you deserve, US corporate media. I'm sure you'll recognize many of the faces at our Christmas party.