According to NewsMax.com, when Vladimir Putin met with the President last week, he was under the impression that Bush had fired Dan Rather.
According to the new Time magazine, when President Bush during his private meeting with Putin raised the question about the Kremlin's crackdown on the media and told Putin that democracies need a media free of government interference, the Russian president responded by asking why CBS reporters lost their jobs [in the wake of the Rathergate scandal] - implying they'd been ousted by the Bush administration.A natural assumption for an old communist, see. You know: an adherent to a form of government where there actually isn't a free press.
Time says Bush was left astonished by Putin's suggestion.
"Putin thought we'd fired Dan Rather," a surprised senior administration official told Time. "It was like something out of 1984."
I think a lot of our Democratic friends who piss and moan about the encroaching loss of a free press fancy themselves canaries in the coal mine. That they do so in an age of unprecedented access to and dissemination of information from every corner of the globe is rather odd. Sure, there's a lot of media conglomeration going on at the highest levels. And, surer yet, when the message is in the voice of fewer in the media, the likelihood that The People will be lied to increases. But that's where the citizen-journalist comes in. That's where the obligation to inform and be informed for the sake of the many is at its greatest.
The blogosphere has this charge now. Use it. Participate in it.