[Peace-discuss] Media lies

[C. G. Estabrook]

[At her Senate hearing yesterday, Rice responded to questions about the
administration's pre-war lies by saying, "You daren't call me
a liar!"  It worked.  --CGE]

	WMDUH!
	Don't expect four months of 
	round-the-clock truth coverage.
	By Matt Taibbi

"The world little noted, but at some point late last year the American
search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ended. We will, however,
long remember the doomsday warnings from the Bush administration about
mushroom clouds and sinister aluminum tubes; the breathless reports from
TV correspondents when the invasion began, speculating on when the
'smoking gun' would be unearthed; our own failures to deconstruct all the
spin and faulty intelligence."
	--New York Times editorial, Jan. 13

The timorous admission made by the White House last week that it had given
up pretending to search for WMDs in Iraq was an occasion for much smugness
and finger-pointing in most of the major dailies.

Among the rest of the population, this laughably tiny news item -- I'm
writing this column on Jan. 13, but by the time this hits the newsstands
on the 18th, it will surely, and amazingly, have been a dead story for
days -- was mainly fodder for two minutes of office water-cooler gloating
among the anti-Bush crowd.

It is unrealistic to expect anything different. In the run-up to the war,
every major daily and television network in the country parroted the White
House's asinine WMD claims for months on end, all but throwing their
panties on stage the instant Colin Powell showed what appeared to be a
grainy aerial picture of a pick-up truck to the U.N. Security Council.

Justice would seem to demand that a roughly equivalent amount of coverage
be given to the truth, now that we know it (and we can officially call it
the truth now, because even Bush admits it; previously the truth was just
a gigantic, unendorsed pile of plainly obvious evidence). But that isn't
the way things work in America. We only cover things around the clock
every day for four or five straight months when it's fun.

O.J. was fun. Monica Lewinsky was fun. "America's New War" was fun—there
was a war at the end of that rainbow. But "We All Totally Fucked Up" is
not fun. You can't make a whole new set of tv graphics for "We All Totally
Fucked Up." There is no obvious location where Wolf Blitzer can do a
somber, grimacing "We All Totally Fucked Up" live shot (above an
"Operation We All Totally Fucked Up" bug in the corner of the screen).
Hundreds of reporters cannot rush to stores to buy special khakis or rain
slickers or Kevlar vests in preparation for "We All Totally Fucked Up."
They would have to wear their own clothes and stand, not in front of
burning tanks or smashed Indonesian hovels, but in front of their own
apartments.

That is why we will never get four months of the truth, to match four
months of preposterous bullshit. The business is not designed for it. It
just can't happen.

Most Americans instinctively understand this and accept it. Even those
people who are consciously offended by this set of circumstances accept
it. It is as natural to us as the weather.

However, there are times when this phenomenon seems to go a little too
far. This is one of those times.

Countless news organizations last week took the same pathetic,
transparently disingenuous position vis a vis the WMD flap that the New
York Times did in the above passage. The basic media lie -- the new lie,
not the old lie -- was a two-pronged thing. It went something like this:

First, Bush admitted there were no WMDs, but so few people cared that it
was "little noted" around the world. Phrases such as "quiet conclusion"
(CBS News) or "quietly ended" (USA Today) or "quiet denouement" (the
Virginia Pilot) reinforced this idea that the story was somehow inherently
quiet and of small import.

Descriptions of the story's small stature were usually followed by a
similarly quiet mea culpa. They usually read something like this: Now that
we know the truth for sure, we media organizations must try to unravel how
it "could have happened" -- how we failed to see through it all, or
"deconstruct all the faulty spin and intelligence," as the Times put it.

Regarding the first point, what could be funnier than the sight of the New
York Times calling a story "little noted," when the paper itself only gave
the story 3.5 inches on Page A16! Like almost all the rest of the papers
in the country, what the Times meant was not "little noted," but little
covered. Amazingly, only two major dailies in the entire country -- the
Washington Post and the Dallas Morning News -- even put the official end
to
the WMD search on the front page. The rest of the country's news organs
buried the story deep in the bowels of their news sections, far behind
Prince Harry's Nazi suit and the residual tsunami stuff. And then they
have the balls to turn around and say this news was "quiet"?

As for the second question -- how it could have happened -- I have an
answer. It is an answer that will not require the convening of a special
symposium at the Columbia Journalism School, the commission of a new study
by the Brookings Institution, or a poll by Poynter. The answer is this:
You lied!

It's really as simple as that. Everyone knew it was bullshit. I defy Bill
Keller to stare me in the face and tell me he didn't know the whole Iraq
war business was a lie from the start. Whether or not there were actually
WMDs in Iraq is a canard; this was essentially unknowable at the time. It
was the rest of it that was obviously idiotic, yet even the pointiest
heads in the business, like the folks at the Times, swallowed it with a
smile.

There was the idea that Saddam Hussein, a secular dictator whose chief
domestic enemies were Islamic fundamentalists, was somehow a natural
potential ally for bin Laden. There was the supposition, credulously
reported for months, that if Saddam "disarmed," we would back off (we were
going in anyway, everyone could see that; all of the "inspections"
coverage, that whole drama, was a pathetic fraud). There was the idea that
Bush and Co. were sincerely moved to grave concern by "intelligence" about
Saddam's weapons (on the contrary, there was a veritable mountain of
evidence that the Bush administration was turning over every couch pillow
in Washington in search of even the flimsiest fig-leaf to stick on its WMD
claims; the source of the WMD panic was clearly the White House, not
Langley or any other place). There was the idea that a preemptive invasion
was not a revolutionary idea, not illegal, not an outrage. And so on.

The problem wasn't a small, isolated ethical error, like Judith Miller's
Chalabi reporting. The error here was not a mistake of fact. The problem
was that a central tenet of our system of news reporting dictates that
lies of consensus will never be considered punishable mistakes. In other
words, once everyone jumps in the water, a story acquires its own
legitimacy.

And now we get papers like the Times wondering aloud why they didn't feel
the ground under their feet. Answer: you jumped in the water. And you knew
what you were doing.

NY PRESS Volume 18, Issue 3

<http://www.nypress.com/18/3/news&columns/taibbi.cfm>