Uh, Frank was talking about print media, not corporates.

Corporates bought into MS-NBC, Fox, etc. and are doing quite hunky-dory at spinning the news.

If you check out many blogs, they spend as much time examining what TV's reported as doing any original thinking. Meaning, TV controls the message still.

Radio of course means "Rush Limbaugh" and his many bastard talk radio offspring, along with Clear Channel, who fired announcers for unpatriotic (meaing anti-war) statements and famously blacklisted the Dixie Chicks for a hardly harsh statement at a concert.

And where Frank Rich really deserves to be taken to the woodshed is this:

Had social media been in place, some of the lonely voices, journalistic and official, challenging the fictions leading up to the Iraq War (not just the bogus WMD but also the bogus links between the 9/11 terrorists and Saddam) would have been amplified on the web, rather than buried in the back pages of newsprint and news sites.

Of course social media did exist at the time, just not called "Twitter", and was used to organize 10-15 million protesters around the world. Why they weren't acknowledged is an issue to take up with his paper and the TV channels, though William Safire below might have an inkling.

Of course we know part of the NY Times'' Judith Miller was busy ditto'ing overhyped nuclear scare stories from the White House even as Frank Rich was noting the Democrats' leaders spinelessness and lack of energy in not contesting the war. Seems the Democrats decided opposing the war was too dangerous for midterms. I've blamed it on Rahm before, but Daschle here was just as dour and unmoving. Needless to say, the feckless Democrats got slaughtered anyway (or because of their fecklessness)

Interestingly, Rich had written about Bush's inviting Jack Welch, MS-NBC's boss, down to Waco, but seemed to miss this as a "CEO's club", supposedly discredited in the wake of Enron and dot-com crash. But these were the supporters for the war effort, including the never-ending media fan club for war, just as Cheney's Energy Task Force wasn't there to come up with strategic plans - it was there to fan on the imperial oil grab with visions of sugar plum fairies dancing in their heads.

I recall seeing Colin Powell's speech to the UN while in an airport, and saying to a colleague, "it's over, we're going to war", and feeling disgust with Hussein for not cooperating more. Unlike many millions, I read a bit more about it in the following days and realized that Blix was much happier with Hussein than Powell's "facts" implicated. But you can't fight that first TV image easily - one of the most trusted faces in America just said Hussein's a low-down two-bit cheater that needs to be strung up, and that's by golly what we did. Live from Jack Welch's studio indeed, as well as the ever-obliging Fox, and the ever globally corporate-focused CNN (with the rising star Lou Dobbs in the lead).

One of the NY Times' war mongers at the time was well-known William Safire, who ironically fought against the consolidation of media with Colin Powell's son heading the FCC

p281
Probably no conservative did more to legitimize the opposition than William Safire. Over the course of 2003, Safire wrote eight columns in the New York Times countering [FCC Chairman Michael] Powell. At key moments in the struggle, Safire produced column after column poking holes in Powell's arguments and demanding that he be stopped. Mixed in with numerous columns supporting the war in Iraq, Safire repeatedly explained why opposition to media consolidation was a bedrock principle for conservatives: "The concentration of power-political, corporate, media, cultural-should be anathema to conservatives. The diffusion of power through local control, thereby encouraging individual participation, is the essence of federalism and the greatest expression of democracy. " "Concentration of power in media," Safire wrote in December, "enables a political clique to concentrate its power. We have to resist this everywhere.