Agenda? What Agenda? Part Deux.

I ought to make this a department like "Our Collapsing Schools."

Via Instapundit comes this email from a 1st Leutenant in the First Armored, currently stationed in Iraq. He hasn't got a lot of respect for the "news" media, and with good reason. Excerpt:

The Fox News crew laid out what qualified as "newsworthy: -- Women taking an active leadership role in the new government, detainee/prisoner abuse cases, any WMD news, and individual soldier contributions (such as one soldier who bought school supplies and teddy bears for Iraqis out of his own pocket.) These were the stories deemed airable and they wouldn't respond to anything outside of that. The news crew wasn't bashful about its agenda and they made it clear that they weren't going to respond to anything outside of those story lines unless it was something really spectacular.

Fox stood out most as a network that knew what it was going to put out before it even shot the footage. Other news organizations were more subtle about what they wanted to cover but pretty much everyone had their stories written before they showed up. To Al-Jazeera especially, the video footage was merely a formality.

(My emphasis.) Has this always existed? I think so, but I don't think it's previously been as institutionalized as it apparently is today.

I strongly recommend that you read the whole thing. Then write ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox a nice letter telling them you're tired of being spoon-fed whatever story they decided a week ago you needed to hear.

Then forward a copy of the email to every journalism school in the U.S.