VILLAGES

Atrios and Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler have shown how insular our pundits and news media really are and I was struck by a passage in KILLING DETENTE by Anne Hessing Cahn. On page 82, she writes that for years, CIA oversight by Congressional committees was a joke:

In 1971, the CIA subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee did not hold one formal meeting to discuss CIA activity. It met only once in 1972 and 1973.

This was all about to change by the end of 1974 (Cahn, p. 85):

The closed system that had defined and controlled U.S. intelligence activities and that had left decisions in the hands of a small group of individuals began to break down.

This reminded me of how the Beltway Elite, aka The Villagers, have controlled opinion formation in America and how some, like MediaMatters and the 2 bloggers above, are trying to do something about it.