Wednesday, April 25, 2007
How the media helped send us to war
Bill Moyers’ new documentary, Buying the War, airs tonight on PBS at 9pm. The Washington Post’s Tom Shales calls it “one of the most gripping and important pieces of broadcast journalism so far this year, but it’s as disheartening as it is compelling.”
Moyers and producer Kathleen Hughes use alarming evidence and an array of respected journalists to make the case that, in the rage that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the media abandoned their role as watchdog and became a lapdog instead.
Exhibit A — the first event recalled in this report — is a news conference by President Bush on March 6, 2003, which Moyers says is two weeks before Bush “will order America to war.” The press conference was a sham, with Bush calling only on “friendly” reporters who’d ask friendly questions. The corker was this scorching investigative query: “Mr. President, how is your faith guiding you?”
Watch a preview:
Labels: American Media, Bill Moyers, Iraq, war
Friday, April 06, 2007
The American media's fringe ideological view of Pelosi's trip
The media's hysteria-driven coverage of Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria is a real clarifying moment. As Greg Sargent notes (with video), it actually prompted CNN's increasingly absurd Suzanne Malveaux to ask: "And, Nancy Pelosi in Syria and in the crosshairs of Vice President Cheney. Is she on her way to becoming the most controversial House Speaker yet?" For doing what?
The American media, taking its cues from the Limbaugh/Cheney/AEI faction -- the world in which negotiating with a country like Syria is some sort of radical and highly "controversial" idea -- simply does not recognize how isolated and on the fringe this right-wing faction is, a fact which even the faction itself is beginning to acknowledge. Today, National Review's Rich Lowry warns of what he says is a scary group that is "on the verge of becoming the most significant force in the West, one that perhaps will shape our world for years, even decades, to come":
It is the Capitulation Caucus.It sounds like the Capitulation Caucus pretty much includes everyone other than Sean Hannity, Dick Cheney, Michael Ledeen and Lowry. And Lowry forgot one other part of the Capitulation Caucus: the majority of the American people, who clearly share the subversive Capitulation agenda.Its membership consists of most nationally elected Democrats in the United States, much of the American foreign-policy elite, the balance of the U.S. media, most international bureaucrats and nongovernmental organizations, and the European political elite.
They are loosely united around their beliefs that the Iraq War is lost or not worth trying to win, that we have to accommodate ourselves to anti-Western thugs in the Middle East and that the United States today is a reckless, malign influence in the world.
Lowry's colleague, Cliff May, this week had what he complained was a day-long exchange with readers of this blog over his false statements about American public opinion regarding foreign policy. But to May's credit, he now consequently seems to have recognized the reality which the American media is apparently incapable of ingesting -- namely, that it is May and his warmongering comrades who are the fringe. May -- citing the polling data (i.e., reality) with which he was bombarded this week -- acknowledged in his latest Townhall column (h/t sysprog):
We like to think of our politicians as leaders but most are followers: They do what they think the voters want them to do (that's the smoothest path to political power), and they divine the will of those voters by reading polls.The warmongering Right that the American media venerates and depicts as the mainstream is, in reality, an ever-shrinking fringe group. Other than the right-wing spectrum in Israel, their mentality and worldview really does not really exist anywhere else in the world, certainly not to any meaningful degree. It is a way of thinking that is widely scorned and discredited around the world -- that our country has been ruled by them is precisely why America's standing in the world is at an all-time and dangerous low point -- and their mindset really is confined strictly to (shrinking) right-wing elements in the U.S. and Israel (along with the Australian Prime Minister).Back in November, even after the Democrats bested Republicans in the elections, it was assumed that most Americans would be furious over any attempt to de-fund troops engaged in combat. But recent polls, taken by such organizations as Pew, CNN and the Washington Post suggest that a substantial number of voters no longer see it that way: Confidence in the possibility of salvaging a successful outcome in Iraq is running low; support for Congress legislating a specific date when American troops will come home is running high.
The idea that we should use military force against Iran, or simply refuse to negotiate with Iran and Syria, or stay in Iraq indefinitely and continue to wage war there, or that a visiting politician's decision to wear culturally appropriate clothing when visiting a mosque is a sign that we are about to live under Islamic law and submit to our new Al Qaeda Rulers -- those ideas come from a fringe and radical group which lies outside of mainstream thought both in the West and around the world, yet those are the ideas that comprise the American media's dominant narrative.
A very astute blogger recently travelled abroad for the first time in several years, and was in England during the time Iran was detaining the British sailors. She sent me an e-mail which included this observation, one which is indisputably true for anyone who pays substantial attention to foreign media:
Even though I didn't bring a laptop and I was sightseeing and visiting as many museums and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, etc ... as I could, I still couldn't help hearing the news about the soldiers. It was unavoidable.This cheap, artificial, mindless Charles Krauthammer/Bill Kristol/Ann Coulter/Dick Cheney chest-beating faux-warrior-against-the-world mentality is now really a distinctly fringe American phenomenon. It does not even exist to any substantial degree in one of America's closest allies, Britain, the country historically most closely aligned with American political thought.What I did not hear was anything resembling the bloodthristy right-wing rantings I (correctly) imagined were being broadcast over here. Perhaps if I paid closer attention to the news while I was there I would have heard something unreasonable, but in my limited exposure to the television, it was nothing -- nothing -- like what you were probably hearing.
And yet the crux of our American media is beholden to that group, takes its cues from it, and treats it like it defines the mainstream. Hence, Nancy Pelosi's belief in engaging the Syrians in dialogue -- a belief endorsed by, among others: (a) the uber-establishment Baker-Hamilton Commission, (b) the Israeli government, and (c) the vast majority of American people ("By 64% to 28%, respondents favored the group's recommendation to open direct talks with Iran and Syria") -- is, in American Media Land, depicted as some sort of radical and fringe idea, something which threatens to make Nancy Pelosi, two months after she took office, "the most controversial House Speaker yet."
Of course, the American media has been working overtime to depict Pelosi as a failed and weak joke before she even was inaugurated (recall the grave, grave crisis over whether Jane Harman would become Intelligence Committee Chair -- have any of the Very Serious Pundits who exploited that very grave matter to suggest that Pelosi's leadership was "crippled" even mentioned the name "Silvestre Reyes" a single time or written a word about the House Intelligence Committee, once the fun, gossipy, petty, manufactured "Pelosi scandal" over the Harman-Hasting drama went nowhere? Highly doubtful).
It is staggering just how out of touch and frivolous our media is. Just contemplate all the substantive scandals during the Bush presidency which they have all but ignored -- they could barely contain their scornful, bored indifference over the fact that the U.S. Attorney General repeatedly lied to Congress about why federal prosecutors were suddenly fired -- but they can hardly contain their giddiness and their compulsive and bizarre cattiness over an event (Pelosi's meeting with Syrian leaders) that, to the normal world, is completely natural and mundane. But the media lives in the Limbaugh/Hannity/Cheney world (Matt Drudge rules it), and in that world, what is in reality fringe and discredited is, to them, the barometer of mainstream.
Labels: American Media, Nancy Pelosi, Right Wing Hypocrites, Right Wing Misinformation Campaign, Suzanne Malveaux, Syria
Monday, March 12, 2007
U.S. Military "emboldens the enemy." U.S. Military Hates America. U.S. Military supports Al-Qaeda. U.S. Military plans "cut and run."
Here's the story:
U.S. military plans Iraq fallback strategy: report
Mon Mar 12, 2007 6:13 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. military planners have begun work on a fallback strategy in case the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq fails, including a gradual pullout of U.S. forces and more emphasis on training and advising Iraqi forces, the Los Angeles Times reported in Monday's editions.
The strategy, based partly on the U.S. experience in El Salvador in the 1980s, is in the early planning stages, the newspaper said, citing U.S. military officials and Pentagon consultants who spoke on condition of anonymity.
It is a fallback if the Bush administration's plan to send about 26,000 more U.S. troops fails to stabilize Iraq, or if the Democratic-led Congress limits that move, it said.
The newspaper quoted a Pentagon official as saying "This part of the world has an allergy against foreign presence. You have a window of opportunity that is relatively short. Your ability to influence this with a large U.S. force eventually gets to a point that is self-defeating."
The United States sent 55 Green Berets to El Salvador to help its military fight rebels from 1981 to 1992, in a drive to make the U.S. military presence less visible, the newspaper said.
It said Pentagon officials said the Iraq plan would have to entail many more advisors, but that the El Salvador model had influenced planning.
There are currently about 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
Shifting from a troop increase to more reliance on an advisory role would bring the administration more in line with the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel that recommended a gradual reduction in U.S. combat forces in Iraq.
________________________________Notes:
Today, at his first Pentagon news conference since taking office in December, Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared that any Iraq resolution opposing President Bush’s escalation plan “certainly emboldens the enemy and our adversaries.” “It seems pretty straightforward that any indication of flagging will in the United States gives encouragement to those folks,” Gates clamed.
Donald Rumsfeld from 11/20/05: “[W]e also have to understand that our words have effects. … Put yourself in the shoes of the enemy. The enemy hears a big debate in the United States, and they have to wonder, maybe all we have to do is wait, and we’ll win.”
In response to Democratic plans to question parts of the USA Patriot Act during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, John Ashcroft suggests that people who disagree with the administration's anti-terrorism policies are on the side of the terrorists. "To those who pit Americans against immigrants, and citizens against non-citizens; to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil."
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle expresses mild disagreement with US anti-terror policies, saying US success in the war on terror "is still somewhat in doubt." In response, Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) says that Daschle's "divisive comments have the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to exploit divisions in our country."
After the disclosure that President Bush received a general warning about possible Al Qaeda hijackings prior to 9/11, Democrats demand to know what other information the administration had before the attacks. In response, White House communications director Dan Bartlett says that the Democratic statements "are exactly what our opponents, our enemies, want us to do."
President Bush says, "You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message... You send the wrong message to our troops by sending mixed messages."
Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) claims that terrorists "are going to throw everything they can between now and the election to try and elect Kerry," adding that Democrats are "consistently saying things that I think undermine our young men and women who are serving over there."
Presidential adviser Karl Rove responds by suggesting that Durbin and other liberals seek to put US troops in danger, saying that "Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."
President Bush says that "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will."
Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) states that "Many on the Democratic side have revealed their exit strategy: surrender"
Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) says that "[T]he liberal leadership have put politics ahead of sound fiscal and national security policy. And what they have done is cooperated with our enemies and are emboldening our enemies.
December 2005: After DNC chairman Howard Dean says "The idea that we're going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong," Republicans reiterate the same line of attack. House Speaker Dennis Hastert says Dean "made it clear the Democratic Party sides with those who wish to surrender" and GOP chairman Ken Mehlman says Dean's statement "sends the wrong message to our troops, the wrong message to the enemy, the wrong message to the Iraqi people."
January 2006: President Bush suggests that "defeatists" on Iraq are disloyal by contrasting them with a "loyal opposition," stating that the American people "know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right."
June 2006: In response to Democratic calls for a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, President Bush suggests that Democrats want to surrender. "There's a group in the opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done," he said. "They're willing to wave the white flag of surrender. And if they succeed, the United States will be worse off, and the world will be worse off." However, Bush adviser Dan Bartlett is unable to name a single Democrat to which this description applies.
Labels: American Media, Right Wing Hypocrites, Where's Fox News?
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Definition of a Double Standard: McCain and Obama make exact same comment, one is forced to Apologize, the other is ignored. Liberal Media my ass.
Print stories on McCain's Letterman appearance omitted his "wasted ... lives" comment, despite attention to Obama's
Summary:In his February 28 appearance on CBS' Late Show with David Letterman, during which he announced his intention to run for the Republican nomination for president in 2008, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claimed that "Americans are very frustrated" with the situation in Iraq and that "they have every right to be." McCain then added: "We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure [in Iraq], which is American lives." The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all published March 1 articles reporting McCain's announcement on the Late Show, with The New York Times and the Post directly quoting McCain from the program -- but none of these articles noted his claim that "we've wasted" American lives in Iraq. Yet when Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) made similar comments in Iowa on February 11, the Post and the Los Angeles Times reported the remarks the following day. The New York Times, meanwhile, devoted a February 13 article to Obama's subsequent apology and clarification.
As of 12:30 p.m. ET, both the Post and The New York Times had posted a separate AP report on McCain's comments. However, while, as of that time, the Post had several links to stories on McCain's Late Show announcement on its homepage, there were no homepage links to the AP story. Further, The New York Times homepage, as of that time, carried no links to any McCain stories and The Los Angeles Times website had yet to post any stories noting McCain's comments.
By contrast, in its March 1 article on McCain's announcement, the Associated Press reported his comment on American lives being "wasted" in Iraq while also noting that Obama had been criticized for making a similar statement:
Discussing the war with Letterman, McCain repeated his assertion that U.S. troops must remain in Iraq rather than withdrawing early even though the war has been mismanaged.
"Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be," McCain said. "We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives."
In February, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama described the lives of troops in Iraq as having been "wasted" but then apologized a day later for making what he called "a slip of the tongue" that he said was not meant to diminish their sacrifice.
— B.A.
Labels: American Media, Double Standard, McCain, Obama
Friday, February 09, 2007
Cranberg wants a serious probe of why the press failed in its pre-war reporting
Veteran Iowa editor wants outsiders, not people in the news industry, to examine why the press is reluctant to challenge authority at times when the country most needs a vigorous, questioning fourth estate.
By Gilbert Cranberg
gilcranberg@yahoo.com
As the war in Iraq nears its fourth anniversary, and with no end in sight, Americans are owed explanations. The Senate Intelligence Committee has promised a report on whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence to justify the war against Iraq. An explanation is due also for how the U.S. press helped pave the way for war. An independent and thorough inquiry of pre-war press coverage would be a public service. Not least of the beneficiaries would be the press itself, which could be helped to understand its behavior and avoid a replay.
Better a study by outsiders than by insiders. Besides, journalism groups show no appetite for self-examination. Nor would a study by the press about the press have credibility. Now and then a news organization has published a mea culpa about its Iraq coverage, but isolated admissions of error are no substitute for comprehensive study.
The fundamental question: Why did the press as a whole fail to question sufficiently the administration’s case for war?
More specifically:
Q. Why did the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau’s “against-the grain reporting” during the build-up to war receive such “disappointing play,” in the words of its former bureau chief?
Q. Why did the press generally fail to pay more attention to the bureau’s ground-breaking coverage?
Q. Why, on the eve of war, did the Washington Post’s executive editor reject a story by Walter Pincus, its experienced and knowledgeable national security reporter, that questioned administration claims of hidden Iraqi weapons and why, when the editor reconsidered, the story ran on Page 17?
Q. Why did the Post, to the “dismay” of the paper’s ombudsman, bury in the back pages or miss stories that challenged the administration’s version of events? Or, as Pincus complained, why did Post editors go “through a whole phase in which they didn’t put things on the front page that would make a difference” while, from August 2002 to the start of the war in March 2003, did the Post, according to its press critic, Howard Kurtz, publish “more than 140 front-page stories that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq”?
Q. Why did Michael Massing’s critique of Iraq-war coverage, in the New York Review of Books, conclude that “The Post was not alone. The nearer the war drew, and the more determined the administration seemed to wage it, the less editors were willing to ask tough questions. The occasional critical stories that did appear were…tucked well out of sight.”
Q. Why did the New York Times and others parrot administration claims about Iraq’s acquisition of aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons when independent experts were readily available to debunk the claims?
Q. Why did the Times’s Thomas E. Friedman and other foreign affairs specialists, who should have known better, join the “let’s-go-to-war” chorus?
Q. Why was a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace accusing the administration of misusing intelligence by misrepresenting and distorting it given two paragraphs in the Times and 700 words in the Post (but deep inside), with neither story citing the report’s reference to distorted and misrepresented intelligence?
Q. Why did Colin Powell’s pivotal presentation to the United Nations receive immediate and overwhelming press approval despite its evident weaknesses and even fabrications?
Q. Why did the British press, unlike its American counterpart, critically dissect the speech and regard it with scorn?
Q. Why did the Associated Press wait six months, when the body count began to rise, to distribute a major piece by AP’s Charles Hanley challenging Powell’s evidence and why did Hanley say how frustrating it had been until then to break through the self-censorship imposed by his editors on negative news about Iraq?
Now is an opportune time for behavioral experts to study these and related aspects of Iraq war coverage while memories are fresh and the actors are readily available. A team of social scientists needs to be convened to design a study and probe the gate-keepers who determined what Americans were told about the lead-up to the Iraq war.
The shortcomings of Iraq coverage were not an aberration. Similar failure is a recurrent problem in times of national stress. The press was shamefully silent, for instance, when American citizens were removed from their homes and incarcerated solely because of their ancestry during World War II. Many in the press were cowed during McCarthyism’s heyday in the 1950s. Nor did the press dispute the case for the fact-challenged Gulf of Tonkin resolution that led to a greatly enlarged Vietnam war.
The press response to the build-up to the Iraq war simply is the latest manifestation of an underlying and ongoing reluctance to dissent from authority and prevailing opinion when emotions run high, especially on matters of war and peace, when the country most needs a questioning, vigorous press.
Foundations that invested in research into how and why the press behaved as it did on Iraq would make a profoundly important contribution.
Labels: American Media, complicit, Iraq, MSM
