The U.S. media is mentally unbalanced and may be exhibiting "Stockholm syndrome"

i am totally ashamed of what passes for a "free press" in my own country... perhaps, after six years of bush holding them hostage, the media would do well to consider whether they might not be victims of "stockholm syndrome*..."

two glaring cases in point (not that there aren't literally TONS more)...

first, as if the paltry to non-existent coverage of the dems national security plan isn't bad enough...

Reporters and news analysts have "repeatedly commented on the Democratic Party's purported lack of a clear plan or concrete set of alternatives on issues ranging from Social Security to the war in Iraq." Yet, after a broad alternative national security strategy was announced Wednesday, the media's interest in such plans seemed to vanish. According to Media Matters, CNN "largely ignored the news," devoting "an hour and a half of uninterrupted coverage to a speech by President Bush on Iraq, his third in two weeks," compared to two minutes for the plan introduced by House and Senate Minority Leaders Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Harry Reid (D-NV). The New York Times failed to include a single story on the strategy, despite printing quotes attacking the document on Tuesday before it was released. Neither the USA Today nor the Los Angeles Times ran news reports on it yesterday either.

but the treatment of jill carroll is beyond comprehension...

• Hours after Carroll's release, Bernard McGuirk, the executive producer and co-host of "Imus in The Morning" (a popular radio show simulcast on MSNBC) said that Carroll "strikes me as the kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests. You know, walk into the — try and sneak into the Green Zone." After it was noted she "cooked" and "lived" with terrorists for three months, McGuirk said she "may be carrying Habib's baby at this point."

• Also shortly after Carroll's release, National Review's John Podhoretz said that "after watching someone who was a hostage for three months say on television she was well-treated because she wasn’t beaten or killed -- while being dressed in the garb of a modest Muslim woman rather than the non-Muslim woman she actually is -- I expect there will be some Stockholm Syndrome talk in the coming days." [...] His colleague Jonah Goldberg, who was recently given a regular column in the LA Times, backed him up, saying "maybe [Podhoretz is] right about Stockholm syndrome." Goldberg added that Carroll "is increasingly starting to bug me," and concluded, "I'm very glad she's alive, but I'm getting a very bad vibe."

i am, literally, speechless...

(thanks to american progress...)

* The Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in a hostage, in which the hostage exhibits seeming loyalty to the hostage-taker, in spite of the danger (or at least risk) the hostage has been put in.

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