American Politics Journal

Ave atque vale, Brill's Content
The Mag That Slapped Around Mainstream Media is No More, and the Washington Post is Gleeful
By Tamara Baker

Oct. 26, 2001 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- As you all probably know by now, Brill's Content is dead.

The magazine that took on and repeatedly embarrassed Kenny Starr's mainstream "press-titutes" over Coupgate and other matters has been deep-sixed, its attempt to survive through merger having failed.

While the mag was maddeningly uneven (kinda like me, but we won't get into that), its good moments were very, very good indeed -- and one of the best was the July 1999 cover story, "War Gets the Monica Treatment".

I'd love to be able to provide a link to that story, but of course Brill's is dead, and so is their website. But a quick Googling will show you that quite a few journalism profs have used that article as course material for showing how corrupt our mainstream press has become. (For more on this article, see http://www.americanpolitics.com/20001024ClintonChile.html.)

For those of you who remember this article, you'll also note how its content (namely, the proven, cast-iron fact that both the Washington Post and the New York Times let the CIA plant in their pages phony stories intended to adversely affect Clinton's Kosovo strategy) was pointedly ignored by the mainstream press, except when they chose to do cheap misdirection attacks and slam Brill's Content for using a "sensationalistic" cover for that issue.

Now comes Peter Carlson of the Washington Post, gloating over BC's demise. He mentions the July 1999 cover story, but -- again -- deliberately refuses to acknowledge the story's content, focusing on trivialities such as the "sensationalistic" cover (Monica's blue dress covered with bullet holes -- oooh! scary! Somebody call Bill Bennett!).

In other words, Mr. Carlson's piece is the most blatant example of lying whoredom I've seen from the Post -- at least, the most blatant example not involving Susan Schmidt, Howie Kurtz, or Michael Kelly.

Gentle Readers: Mr. C. can be reached at carlsonp@washpost.com. You know what to do.

And in the meantime, I'm going to go over my back issues of Brill's Content and see about PDFing certain key articles, and possibly posting them on the Net, should the legal eagles think it advisable. We cannot let the bad guys think that they are forever safe from the truth.