Don't buy the idea that the country has been hijacked by a fanatical cabal driven by delusional religio-ideological musings and grandiose designs? That they are assisted by a coterie of rehabilitated apparatniks whose former high crimes and misdemeanors have been absolved only through a fortuitous revision of history and cynical redefinition of righteousness? That the junta's willing accomplices is a band of former henchmen, cronies and outright flacks who help them wage their conspiracy through a campaign of pathos, bathos, misinformation and misdirection?
Okay.
But, unless you are part of the Bush ex machina crowd, there are some very disconcerting aspects to the way we are administering our democracy in these days of WAR. One of those is the cooptation of the media. How credible is the expertise of the former "Drug Czar" whose latest campaign was a Baptist jihad of a war blindly and viciously waged on Americans? Who chortles at the mass destruction that will rain down on the enemy and minimizes the collateral damage to our troops and their civilians? How impartial can a newcaster who has been in the Israeli Army and lived on a kibbutz be in dealing with Middle Eastern affairs? Would you respect a journalist who was part of the Intifada? Doesn't balanced reporting mean that - every now and then, given the law of probabilities - there is an "expert" with a differing view, maybe even a different perspective? It is obvious to most that even if you find some sort of comic relief or emotional support in the idiot commentaries found on stations like MSNBC or Fox, that if you choose to be quided by information from these sources, well, we respect your right to make a stupid choice.
And, while we have come to be vigilant about these sources, we have always trusted the "mainstream media" to be somewhere in the middle and somewhat objective. That is becoming a distinction without a difference. Professional journalism has enlisted into the ranks of boosterism. Given an opportunity to ride in the parade has the media so obviously enlisting in the war effort that any semblance of objectivity has been abandoned. There are numerous and obvious examples but one of those is the recent characterization of the fedayeen as trained terrorists and not just the usual dirty ops that we have come to glamorize. It's only now that we are beginning to hear disconcerting things about these guys. But, from the very beginning they were characterized by every journalist, including Tom Brokaw, as "terrorists", "terrorist-trained", etc. The press, obviously shocked and awed, merely mouthed the characterization of those troops that they had received from our central command.
Directly below this post is a reprint of an earlier article detailing how the media was duped in the last war. Underneath that is a story about the vaunted WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION and a claim by Newsweek that a highly placed defector had told the US that they had been destroyed. Remember the chemical plant? I read in a British newspaper that the plant had been abandoned three years ago. This may explain why my recent post of Wired's MEDIA WATCHDOGS CAUGHT NAPPING discusses that our own citizens are going to external sources for their news coverage.
Many people understand that the media has become institutionally embedded in the military campaign.
What sources can you rely on. None. But do look around. Expect, of course, the unsanitized news to come from countervailing sources (click). A recent CubaNews (click) email listserv notes, for example that the BBC had "quoted an unnamed senior news source as saying: 'We're absolutely sick and tired of putting things out and finding they're not true,' adding that 'the misinformation in this war is far and away worse than any conflict I've covered, including the first Gulf war and Kosovo.' The source pointed out that on Saturday correspondents were told that Basra and Nassiriya had been taken and subsequently found out neither were true. Veteran war correspondent Martin Bell has called for 24-hour news channels to "curb their excitability" and warned against unsubstantiated reports which may help the US/UK cause, but later turn out to be false."
As CubaNews goes on to say, "In the United States, meanwhile, the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)(click) has blasted the lack of skepticism on the part of American journalists that have led many prominent news anchors into embarrassing errors in their coverage of the UN invasion of Iraq - particularly in relation to claims that proof had been found that Iraq possesses banned weapons, and that Iraq has fired banned Scud missiles into Kuwait."
When this war enters the annals of history, there will be studies of the collateral damage suffered by the institution of journalism. Ensconced on that bullet-riddled wall of shame will be many names, many of them "journalists".
