The NYT's Michiko Kakutani looks at Attack The Messenger: How politicians turn you against the media, by Craig Crawford of the Congressional Quarterly.

Some excerpts:

"Attack the Messenger" isn't nearly as comprehensive or incisive as the reader might want: Eric Boehlert of Salon, Frank Rich of The New York Times, Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books, Eric Alterman of The Nation and Ken Auletta in The New Yorker have all written about aspects of the Bush administration's relationship with the press, and done so with far greater acuity and depth than this volume demonstrates.

Still, Mr. Crawford's book serves as a useful introduction to the issue at hand, providing a persuasive, if incomplete, sketch of how the current White House, with assists from its two predecessors and a changing media landscape, has worked to undermine the mainstream press.

Although the news media now enjoy higher approval ratings than President Bush, Mr. Crawford notes that the media's standing with the public has fallen sharply from its high during the Watergate era. And he argues that the falloff in trust stems from "the vilification of the news media by politicians," combined with a host of other developments: the proliferation of Internet sites and cable television outlets, many of them highly partisan in attitude and content; a series of self-inflicted wounds on the part of the press (including Dan Rather's flawed reporting of a CBS story about the younger Mr. Bush's National Guard service, the Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times and the Jack Kelley scandal at USA Today); public distaste for the salacious details of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair, which was covered at length by an increasingly gossip-hungry media; and the nation's post-9/11 mood, which was exploited by the current administration to depict any questioning of the war against Iraq as a sign of disloyalty and lack of patriotism.

Meanwhile, the press has often unwittingly aided politicians by flagellating itself. As Mr. Crawford astutely notes, journalists "seldom defend" themselves. In addition, they allow themselves, on occasion, to be distracted from covering the news made by politicians and government officials to engage in cannibalistic navel-gazing - a phenomenon fueled by Internet bloggers, cable news pundits and talk radio partisans like Rush Limbaugh, who are intent on promoting themselves at the expense of the mainstream media.

As a result of all this, Mr. Crawford suggests, politicians now "have the advantage in defining truth." "Armies of press aides, pseudojournalists and well-funded advocacy groups, are in place as an alternative to the traditional news media," he writes. "The great irony is that the rise of this propaganda machine feeds on the belief that the news media is biased. Yet often there is no one more biased than those who hurl the charge."

That, I would argue, is well-established.

However, the problem is worse in the United States than Canada, this being a much more centrist country.