Memo to Mainstream Media by Geov Parrish

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Fri, 03 Jun 2005 11:38:43 -0700

Memo to Mainstream Media by Geov Parrish

 

http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0523/050608_news_geovparrish.php

 

 

POLITICS

Memo to Mainstream Media

 

by Geov Parrish

 

I have a three-word response to the media frenzy that followed

revelation of the long-secret identity of Deep Throat: Downing Street

Memo.

 

Here's what John Dean, a key Watergate figure, wrote about Dubya's

case for the Iraq war in a June 2003 column for www.findlaw.com: " To

put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war

based on bogus information, he is cooked. . . . Manipulation or

deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven,

could be a 'high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause. "

 

That's exactly what the Downing Street Memo, first reported a

month ago by The Times of London, proves. The memo is an account of

the report given to British leadership by Richard Dearlove, head of

Britain's MI-6 (the equivalent of the CIA), after a meeting with top

White House officials. Dearlove described, fully eight months before

the invasion of Iraq, an American determination to go to war and to

manipulate public and congressional opinion with what Dearlove

characterized as a " thin " case for the presence of weapons of mass

destruction and links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

 

It's hard not to contrast the frenzy that greeted the revelation

of a 30-year-old secret with the thudding indifference U.S. media have

given the Downing Street Memo. The memo has scarcely been mentioned in

the country's leading newspapers and has been completely ignored by

evening network news.

 

The reasons are numerous, but it adds up to a depressing reminder

that Watergate, as reported in 1972–74, would never be reported today.

The same secrecy, paranoia, and demands for absolute loyalty that were

the undoing of the Nixon administration have been used, in our modern

media climate, with resounding success by the Bush administration.

Media outlets today are far less willing to invest the time and money

in investigative journalism, far less willing to rock the boat or risk

being tagged with the dreaded " liberal media " tag. The right-wing

firestorm that followed the miscues of Dan Rather and Newsweek has

further cowed big media outlets from taking risks, but the barriers

were already there, as Gary Webb could testify if he hadn't killed

himself last December. The career costs can be enormous for

enterprising journalists who want to take on power, and the likelihood

that your publisher will back you up these days, as Bob Woodward and

Carl Bernstein were backed up by The Washington Post, is

unpredictable. Webb reported and wrote a series of stories about the

CIA and crack cocaine for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. Under a

flurry of criticism, including from other mainstream newspapers, his

editors backed away from the series' findings. Two years later, the

CIA confirmed some of Webb's major findings.

 

The information needed to impeach George Bush for lying to

Congress, the United Nations, and the American public about the most

serious imaginable matter—the misuse of military force—is all out

there. It's been reported, in foreign media, in the alternative press,

in the margins. But it has not been championed by major media, and so

it has not been taken to heart by either the American public or

Congress. Bush and his aides intentionally lied about the case for

mounting an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country. The outcome

has been a conflict that has so far left more than 1,400 American

soldiers dead, many thousands more maimed, and has led to the deaths

of an estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians. The Downing Street Memo

erases any doubt about the intentional nature of the disinformation

campaign waged upon us to justify this war.

 

Obviously, a Republican-controlled Congress is not about to

impeach its own president. Enormous public pressure would have to be

brought to bear. But that public pressure has also been missing,

starting with the media coverage. It's difficult to imagine, at this

point, any sort of " smoking gun " sufficient to generate momentum

against the Bush administration. Vietnam era dissident Daniel Ellsberg

has been touring the country for the past year, urging federal

officials within earshot to do as he did with the Pentagon Papers

about the Vietnam War, which he leaked to The New York Times—to do as

Deep Throat did with the Watergate cover-up, to leak to the press what

they know of the Bush administration's misdeeds. But even that might

not be enough, because there is no guarantee that the press would even

carry, let alone highlight in proper context, such allegations.

 

We now know the identity of Deep Throat. Fine. But take a moment

to mourn the fact that the courage and integrity displayed by Deep

Throat would not be effective today, because there seems to be nobody

in our country's major media willing to hear such secrets. We've lost

an essential tool for accountability of our country's highest powers.

They still lie and cheat—only, today, we no longer seem to care.

 

gparrish

http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0523/050608_news_geovparrish.php