Hans Blix, Dennis Kucinich and the Dixie Chicks are in very different lines of work -- but they're in the same line of fire from big media for the sin of strongly challenging the president's war agenda.

[...] A few weeks before President Bush launched an undeclared war on Iraq, "liberal" Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen declared his own war on Kucinich. The main trigger for Cohen's wrath was that the member of Congress had dared to identify oil as "the strongest incentive" for the impending war.

Cohen claimed to be shocked shocked shocked. The first word of his column was "liar." From there, the Post columnist peppered his piece with references to Kucinich as an "indomitable demagogue" and a "fool" who was "repeating a lie." But Cohen would have done well to re-read a front page of his own newspaper.

As many business pages have long highlighted, it's actually quite reasonable to identify oil as key to U.S. policy toward Iraq. But such talk from a presidential candidate causes some people to become incensed. That hardly makes Kucinich a "liar." On the contrary, it simply makes him a pariah in the media realms patrolled by the likes of Richard Cohen.

[...] Similar media gendarmes are on patrol over the airwaves. The giant corporate owner of more than 1,200 radio stations, Clear Channel, syndicates talk radio host Glenn Beck to scores of stations nationwide -- and Beck is enraged about Kucinich. Days before the all-out war on Iraq began, Beck discussed spontaneous combustion and then said: "Every night I get down on my knees and pray that Dennis Kucinich will burst into flames." [more]

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