The big F.U. that corporate media execs gave to the American people and, more importantly, U.S. soldiers. Jessica Yellin told Anderson Cooper last night the following:

Yellin: I think the press corps dropped the ball in the beginning when the lead up to war began, uh the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the President’s high approval ratings and my own experience at the White House was that the higher the President’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives, and I was not at this network at the time, but the more pressure I had from these executives to put on positive stories about the President. I think over time….

The video is available at Crooks and Liars.

As Glenn Greenwald puts it:

Yellin’s admission is but the latest in a growing mountain of evidence demonstrating that corporate executives forced their news reporters to propagandize in favor of the Bush administration and the war, and censored stories that were critical of the Government. Katie Couric yesterday said that threats from the White House and accusations of being unpatriotic coerced the media into suppressing its questioning of the war. But last September, Couric revealed even more specifically the type of pressure that was put on her by NBC executives to refrain from criticizing the administration, after she conducted a “tough interview” with Condoleezza Rice:

We have been suffering a crisis in democracy here in the old U.S.A., and now the evidence is mounting against those who created this crisis. Congress needs to start acting on it, not for political gain, but because this nation deserves it.

Glenn Greenwald has