Could Glenn Greenwald be any more correct in his blog entry “Ending the war vs. supporting the troops“.

All in all the entry isn’t very interesting to me – the way however in which he explains how reporting apparently works today is a gem of a quality you hardly find on the net. I have to add that personally I feel this is definitely not only true for political reporters. The long term repercussions of bad reporting is an uninformed society. Not being informed is the last thing the society will notice before it’ll fall into (probably unnoticed) totalitarianism.

[...]One of the principal functions of political reporters ought to be to dissect and dispense with misleading political sloganeering, but instead, they fulfill the opposite function: they are the most enthusiastic and effective disseminators of these cliches.

Some of them do it consciously and knowingly, for ideological reasons, to curry favor with sources. But many of them are driven by a far more banal dynamic. They “analyze” political disputes this way because most of their impressions are shaped by Beltway political operatives whom they respect and admire, on whom they depend, and this is how they have things explained to them. [...]