The new foreign policy team - Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates who will stay on as secretary of defense - are named.

And so do the networks use the occasion to comment on the lies of the Iraq War, the sham of the War on Terror, the obscene amount of money used on armaments? The deaths of 100,000s? Perhaps speculating on whether this will change?

No, the talk of the day is will Hillary get along with Robert and will Hillary get along with Barack? Will the U.S. be okay and recover from its mistakes?

If anyone doubts that Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky are spot-on in their institutional analysis of the corporate mass media in their Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988), I recommend reading the book or the transcript of Chomsky's talk delivered at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, March 15, 1989.