Froomkin on Colbert and Stewart

Dan Froomkin hits the nail on the head today in the Washington Post. This, however, is not a new premise or idea. The left-leaning blogosphere has been saying this since before 9/11/01. The MSM just spell checks and reprints whatever "Bushshit" the White House pumps out. They don't fact check or do any analysis nor do they put any kind of perspective on what is being posited. They don't test the premise against reality or history and leave the reader or listener to have at their fingertips all of the resources necessary to compare and contrast what is being said with the truth.
Granted, that's the White House expectation of the traditional media and true to the old wives' tale ' you get what you pay for" , much to our disservice. The traditional media still believes that the Whitehouse is going to be basically telling the truth but maybe with a little spin. This is ancient history. The Bush Whitehouse has thrown out that playbook and written their own. Lying is now the standard operating procedure. Lying is the norm. We will be ill served by the traditional media until they get this through their pointy little heads. Trust Bush and his minions at your peril. If you doubt and therefore verify and othewise validate what they say independently then you may get to the truth even if they are not telling you what it is.

Here is Dan to speak for himself.

Both Colbert and Stewart have risen to superstar status largely by calling (how can I put it here?) baloney on the Bush administration -- and on the press corps that transmits said baloney without the appropriate skepticism or irony.

Their very subversive message, at its core: That this Bush guy is basically a joke. And that the mainstream press is a joke, because it takes Bush at his word. ....

The way I see it, the Washington press corps is still appropriately embarrassed that they screwed up in the run-up to war. Now, as Bush's approval ratings fester, they are getting bolder in challenging the official White House line on any number of issues. They're justifiably proud of a handful of great investigative pieces.

But they still haven't addressed the central issue Colbert was raising: Bush's credibility. As it happens, the public is way ahead of them on this one: For more than a year, the polls have consistently been showing that a majority of Americans don't find Bush honest and trustworthy.