When the Media Bends Over Backwards for Bush

In the last 70 years or so, the news media has had high points and low points. A high point was Edward R. Murrow reporting from London during World War Two. A low point was the media frenzy over the O.J. Simpson trail. The first three years of the Bush Administration was clearly a low point for the media and even now the major news outlets are currently a long ways from redemption though there have been some improvement in the coverage of Bush's second term.
Todd Gitlin has a post in TPM Cafe concerning the problems of the mainstream news media:

The former WP ombudsman Michael Getler has a mixed, or maybe backhandedly favorable, review of Eric Boehlert's valuable new book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush in tomorrow's paper.... For the moment I can't resist rebutting one of Getler's points: that you can't legitimately say that the press rolled over for Bush without "knowing what was inside the heads of producers and editors at the time their news decisions were made."

I like Gitlin's summary of the media's problem that he gives later in the article but let me add my own very simple two bits. If it rolls over like a lapdog, if it begs like a lapdog, if it gets the royal treatment like a lapdog, it doesn't much matter what the former news hound is thinking: it's become a lap dog.