Browsing at Barnes & Noble last night I stumbled into a peculiar-looking book called “Casualty of War: The Bush Administration's Assault on a Free Press” by David Dadge, which makes the argument that in the War on Terror and elsewhere, Bush has cut down on press freedoms, the New York Times’ daily criticism of him notwithstanding.
The book’s thesis, after all, is very much contradicted by its own existence. If there really were an “assault on a free press,” wouldn’t those carrying out the assault have found a way to keep such a book off the shelves of a major corporate bookstore like B&N, along with the titles by Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and others that shared the same shelf?
I guess the book is supposed to be ominous, but that effort is very much undercut by the choice to put Ari Fleischer on the cover, Fleischer being the least ominous-looking press secretary in White House history. Believe me, I’ve had plenty of negative stuff to say about Bush lately, as you can see below. But an “assault on a free press” is when journalists are tossed in gulags, or shot, for exposing the truth. I don’t know of Bush doing either.
(Funny bonus fact: When you enter “Bush” into the Amazon search engine, the first three results have nothing to do with either president, but rather are albums by the shitty band of the same name that sang “Glycerine.” Even worse, the 55th result is this.)
Posted by Stephen Silver at March 20, 2004 12:32 AM