Bill Moyers, bastion of journalistic objectivity in the greatest tradition of Pravda, is coming out with a critique of the media's performance before the Iraq War.
When I saw the headline on Drudge "'Devastating' Bill Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming on PBS; Dan Rather Admits: I Blew It...", frankly I was stunned.
Remembering how hard the press fought the idea of action against Iraq in the months-long "rush to war," and remembering the complete lack of objectivity which is characteristic of Moyers (he's to the Left of Dennis Kucinich), I wondered how Moyers could possibly be responsible for a media report that finally came clean about the overwhelming liberal, anti-war bias displayed by the press.
Then I got hit in the face with a cold bucket of reality.
From Editor & Publisher:
While much of the evidence of the media’s role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.
What a selective memory they have!
The best information our and every other intelligence agency on the planet had indicated Saddam had or was in the process of developing WMDs, yet the media "didn't dig enough."
What, they didn't feature enough interviews with Saddam, telling us how innocent he was? They didn't feature enough propaganda from the French, Germans and Russians (who were in bed financially with Iraq) about how we should leave the peace-loving peoples of Iraq alone?
They didn't feature enough prattle from the UN (that was also in bed financially with Iraq) about how we needed to ignore Saddam's defiance of their own 17 resolutions and "just give peace a chance?"
Maybe the media focused too much on those empty ultimatums to Saddam from the UN and our own congress...only with President Bush, they weren't empty.
Maybe the media should have worked harder to give Saddam longer to hide his WMDs by sending them to Syria, burying them, and dumping them into the Euphrates River; if only they'd done a better job of slowing down the months-long rush to war, we wouldn't have found the chemical weapons we did.
I guess the "mainstream" media will just never run out of new tricks to keep amazing me with not only how biased they can be while calling themselves "objective," they'll never lose their ability to remain utterly blind about their own bias, even to the point of pointing out how their missed opportunities to have been even more biased prove their objectivity.
2 comments:
Did the you NOT watch ANY FOX news during the buildup?
The "selective memory" jab he makes is an outright absurdity. He's clearly remembering only the handful of stories on NPR and a few other outlets that opposed the war, and ignoring the outright cheer leading of much of the FOX news coverage.
Before I'd seen the Dakota Voice as a biased source that at least tried to be accurate. Now I know that it is in fact more interested in pimping a Conservative Agenda than in accuracy or reality.
The reference to sending the WMDs to Syria is also an absurdity. It's a fiction based on speculation and propped up by hope. There's no evidence that such a transaction occurred, or that Saddam actually HAD a viable WMD program at the time of the invasion.
Clinging to absurd premises and discredited speculation only makes the conservative press look foolish. It's akin to my tenth Grade Biology teacher insisting that men had one less rib than women. Sticking to inaccurate data only makes you look like a fool.
We rip Science textbooks and school boards a new one for continuing to list discredited hoax fossils as "proof" of evolution. We should hold our own news and editorial sources to the same standards we demand of others.
Apparently Matthew also has a selective memory. He tries to come across as if he were a conservative, perhaps even a conservative Christian, who is just so concerned about accuracy and all that, but he made several slips in what he said that reveal him for the liberal obfuscationist he is.
The "mainstream" media did nothing but bellyache about a lack of proof of WMDs in the months preceding the war. Fox News was one of the few "mainstream" outlets that allowed any unfiltered discussions to get out about the justifications for invasion.
Yes, Dakota Voice is biased, just as every outlet is biased. We aim for accuracy but don't try to hide behind some pretended veil of "objectivity." If you don't know facts, that's the time for objectivity. Once those facts are known, you're either on the side of the truth or on the side of a fiction.
Syria is a well-known terrorist haven that borders Iraq. Nizar Nayuf, a Syrian journalist, said in 2004 that he knew of three sites where Iraqi WMDs were being stored in Syria. There were also reports in 2004 about chemicals such as VX and Sarin being captured in Jordan from al-Qaeda members who said they got the chemicals in Syria; some terrorism experts believe those chemicals originated in Iraq. The Iraqi foreign minister Hoshiyar Zebari also confirmed in 2004 that the WMDs had been hidden.
We spent something like 8 months or more hee-hawing around with congress and the UN, trying to get them onboard, before we finally invaded Iraq in 2003. That was more than enough time for Saddam to hide and/or ship out anything he had. It shouldn't be a surprise that we didn't find much. If the police gave a suspect 8 months warning before searching his house, how much evidence do you think they'd find?
And again, you're forgetting that we didn't even need the justification of Saddam actually having WMDs to invade; he had defied 17 UN resolutions in support of the peace agreement Saddam had agreed to at the end of the Persian Gulf war; that was more than enough justification, especially when you consider the fact that he had fired on our and British planes with SAMs numerous times.
But go ahead, Matthew; you seem comfortable with your head buried in the sand.
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