Fair And Balanced?

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http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/affalert230.shtml

 

The Iraq Scandals: Media Failures Are Next

 

By Danny Schechter

MediaChannel.org

 

NEW YORK, July 19, 2004 - By July of 2004, much of

what was left of the pretexts and rationalizations for

the US invasion of Iraq had unraveled. Public opinion

had turned against the war. The press was filled with

admissions of " failures. "

 

Richard Clarke, President's Bush's own terrorism

coordinator, went public with a view of the war as

evidence of a failure of policy. It was, he charged,

not only NOT part of the war on terror but undermining

it.

 

Experienced military leaders like General Anthony

Zinni and others condemned the war as military

failure.

 

A Senate Committee in the US and a commission headed

by Lord Butler in the UK catalogued extensive

intelligence failures. The senators condemned what

they called " groupthink. "

 

These critics -- including the 9/11 Commission --

remain relatively narrow in their approach by focusing

on problems or process and organizational defects. Few

look at the larger picture or dare to hold politicians

directly accountable. The Butler Commision

specifically exonerated Prime Minister Tony Blair.

 

Critics consider many of these inquiries as part of a

cover-up, not signs of serious investigation to expose

wrong-doing and, more importantly, its consequences.

In intelligence circles, this is called a " limited

hang out " -- a technique in which some disclosures are

dribbled out to avoid revealing more devastating ones.

The effect is an illusion of real candor.

 

Take The New York Times. On July 16, it admitted in an

editorial that " we were wrong about the weapons. " But

what about the rest of its coverage, which underplayed

civilian casualties, missed many of the reasons for

the Iraqi resistance, and was behind on the Abu Ghraib

torture story? Ditto for The Washington Post whose

ombudsman faulted underreporting of demonstrations.

 

In my soon-to-be-released film WMD,

(www.wmdthefilm,com) based on my own study of the

coverage of the war, leading anti-war organizer Leslie

Cagan says that such underreporting was not the

problem: " What there was not decent coverage of was

the analysis. What we were trying to say about what

was wrong with the war, why we never should've gone to

war, why the war needed to end, what was driving--the

motor force behind the war. That analysis never got

into the mainstream media. "

 

Orville Schell, the head of the Journalism Department

at the University of California at Berkeley explained

that that's because media outlets " not only failed to

seriously investigate administration rationales for

war, but little took into account the myriad voices in

the on-line, alternative, and world press that sought

to do so. "

 

The " groupthink " cited by the Senate was not confined

to government agencies. This apt phrase could as

easily be applied to the one institution charged with

scrutinizing official failures: the media.

 

To the list of institutional failures, we can now add

the powerful U.S. news industry, which gave the war

its legitimacy and organized public support for it by

a pattern of over-hyped and under-critical reporting

in which jingoism was often substituted for

journalism.

 

As US public opinion turns against the war, and world

condemnation of the occupation increases, some voices

in the media are now being heard as their scandalous

complicity finally becomes an issue.

 

With a few prominent media institutions acknowledging

their flawed coverage, others are likely to follow.

Despite the essential media support for US foreign

policy, and a propensity for news managers to follow

the government's lead in setting the agenda, dissent

is growing and it is likely that the mea culpas now

being seen in the pages of The New York Times and The

Washington Post will grow into a larger chorus before

a consensus for action is formed.

 

Like the Vietnam War, what was once a vocal minority's

view will work its way into the mainstream and find

broad acceptance.

 

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was the

first to identify this process, and wrote that " All

truth passes through three stages. First, it is

ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it

is accepted as self-evident. "

 

The process usually starts with a few individuals

whose skepticism is rewarded with recriminations and

even dismissal. In the news world, it began with the

firing of small town newspaper editors and cartoonists

who dared to dissent. Few nationally known newspeople

came to their defense.

 

Popular TV talk show host Phil Donahue came next,

purged by MSNBC for his anti-war programming. That

network's most heavily promoted correspondent Ashleigh

Banflied was " taken to the woodshed " when she

questioned MSNBC's coverage at a talk at Kansas State

University. The network later dropped her.

 

Soon, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Peter

Arnett was fired for saying on Iraqi TV what he was

also saying on American television -- that the US

military was underestimating Iraqi resistance. That

view, which has now been accepted, was branded then as

treason and worse. Arnett was targeted first by Fox

News and later made the subject of a campaign by the

Free Republic website which flooded NBC executives

with demands that he be fired.

 

Critics of the war were not just ridiculed. They were

ignored and marginalized. Former BBC chief Greg Dyke

(who was forced to resign because of a scandal

involving BBC reporting which was later found to be

baseless)said that of 800 experts interviewed on US TV

in the run-up to the war and during the US invasion

only six challenged the war,. A FAIR study of 1,716

on-air sources cited by TV news in this period found

that 71 percent supported the war, while only 3

percent opposed it.

 

This lack of balance on TV -- the medium that most

Americans turn to for their news -- has yet to be

acknowledged, explained or apologized for even as some

TV journalists reluctantly begin to admit they were

wrong. When CNN' s Christianne Amanpour charged that

her own network and others were muzzled, no TV

correspondents echoed her charge or offered their own

experiences. Recently CNN's Wolf Blitzer admitted " we

just weren't skeptical enough. " To his credit Fox's

Bill O'Reilly admitted (not on Fox but on Good Morning

America) that he was wrong on WMD's too.

 

These media failures have opened the door and a mass

market for counter-narratives and other media offering

alternate and suppressed information. Speaking of

Michael Moore's film Fahreheit 911, George Monbiot, a

columnist for The Guardian, said: " The success of his

film testifies to the rest of the media's failure. "

San Francisco Chronicle writer Tim Goodman charged

that " Fahrenheit 9/11 " is rattling the cages of

established journalism.

 

This is a cage that needs to be rattled. Already Fox

is under attack in Robert Greenwald's new film

OutFoxed. For the trifecta, watch for WMD.

 

-- News Dissector Danny Schechter writes a daily blog

for Mediachannel.org. His new film WMD

(wmdthefilm.com) is making the rounds of festivals.

His book " Embedded Weapons of Mass Deception "

(Prometheus Press) was the first book to examine the

media failures in Iraq.

 

© MediaChannel.org, 2004. All rights reserved.

 

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