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If you're in a position of power and you want to say something, just say it, no matter what, and the media will repeat it and repeat it.
Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction to speak of? No matter. Just say he did. He wasn't six months away from nuclear capability? So what—just assert that he was. He wasn't tied to 9-11, there was no famous Prague meeting? No problem. Suggest there might have been. Muddy it up. Good enough.
Bush and co. knew that the media are constitutionally unequipped to call a lie a lie. People in the media like to flatter themselves as truth-tellers and the people's watchdogs and all that, but the fact is that except in very rare circumstances, there's no such thing as "objective truth" in the media, particularly the political media. There's just what one side says and what the other side says.

the McCain campaign has taken it to extremes that make even Dick Cheney look like a wallflower. The number and intensity of outright lies, even for jaded observers, is just staggering.
There's Sarah Palin's lies about the bridge and earmarks. There's an unbelievable one I mentioned yesterday about Obama's alleged opposition to combat systems. There's the flatly false assertion to middle-class audiences that Obama will raise their taxes, even though his tax plan does no such thing.
Now there's this incredible McCain education ad that tries to argue that Obama wants to pervert kindergartners. The legislation, in Illinois, was in fact designed to allow local school boards to teach "age appropriate" sex education – and to teach children about how to identify sexual predators!
And then there's this silly pig-lipstick business, which I wouldn't even dignify by mentioning except that, obvious as it was that Obama was talking about McCain and not Palin, the McCain camp has now created something called the "Palin Truth Squad" that was formed to push the lie that Obama was talking about Palin. I'll say that again: a "truth squad" created for the express purpose of pushing a lie.
And where is the truth squad of the press, the people's watchdogs? Mostly enjoying the show, hyping the "mudslinging" between the two sides, which of course "both sides" are guilty of. Nonsense. Obama and Biden distort certain things about McCain's record – that whole 100 years in Iraq business is a stretch. But McCain did say it, so it's only a stretch, not a fabrication.
McCain and Palin are engaged in serial total fabrications. And almost no one calls them on it. The New York Times, which found the space to run a puffy piece on Palin's family on its front page the other day, hasn't found similar space to run a story under a headline like, "McCain-Palin Claims Stretch Credulity, Some Say.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...ain.sarahpalin