Hightower Lowdown

One would think that multibillion-dollar media giants (from CBS to CNN, The New York Times to the Washington Post) would bring at least a smidgen of journalistic skepticism to the military's claims about its technological prowess.

The Pentagon's latest whopper, swallowed whole by the media, was about a ballyhooed test of the razzle-dazzle Star Wars missile-defense scheme. The Bush team is determined to dump $160 billion of our tax dollars into it, even though it's so technologically flawed that military experts think it's silly.

Bush and his corporate partners scheduled a test in July in which a "bad guy" missile was fired at the U.S. and a "good guy" missile was launched to shoot it down in mid-air. Sure enough, the Pentagon claimed that this impossibility happened, asserting the "bad guy" was blasted out of the sky. The media widely proclaimed it a success.

Only now have we learned that the test was rigged—our "good guy" missile was programmed with information about the time and location of the "bad guy" launch, and the "bad guy" even had a beacon on board to guide the "good guy" to it.

It's hard to take the media seriously as long as it continues to act as a straight man for the jokesters of the military-industrial complex.