The public shares the blame for accepting a fourth estate that simply regurgitates US policy statements as fact, and stopped questioning established worldview post-Cold War.

WMD

16 Years Later, How the Press That Sold the Iraq War Got Away With It

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone. March 22, 2019

In an excerpt from his new book Hate Inc., Matt Taibbi looks back at how the media built new lies to cover their early ones.

“Defense budgets exploded. NATO expanded. The concept of a “peace dividend” faded to the point where few remember it ever existed. We now maintain a vast global archipelago of secret prisons, routinely cross borders in violation of international law using drones, and today have military bases in 80 countries, to support active combat operations in at least seven nations (most Americans don’t even know which ones).

“The WMD episode is remembered as a grotesque journalistic failure, one that led to disastrous war that spawned ISIS. But none of the press actors who sold the invasion seem sorry about the revolutionary new policies that error willed into being. They are specifically not regretful about helping create a continually-expanding Fortress America with bases everywhere that topples regimes left and right, with or without congressional or UN approval.”

So, who’s culpable? Who deserves blame?

Media

  • New Yorker editor David Remnick, who later scoffed, “Nobody got that story completely right,” who wrote a piece called “Making the Case,” was a source of many of the most ferocious pro-invasion pieces
  • The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, one of a number of WMD hawks who failed up after the war case fell apart.
  • New York Times reporter named Judith Miller
  • Washington Post (Fred Hiatt) and New York Times (Thomas Friedman) were key editorial-page drivers of the conflict
  • MSNBC unhired Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura over their war skepticism
  • CNN flooded the airwaves with generals and ex-Pentagon stoolies, and broadcast outlets ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS stacked the deck with 266 of 267 guests in a two week period who promoted the war.
  • Prominent Democrat voices like Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and even quasi-skeptic Nick Kristof (who denounced war critics for calling Bush a liar)
  • Neoconservatives like Max Boot, David Frum, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan
  • Winger goons like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter

Administration

  • Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer
  • Current administration official John Bolton
  • Condoleezza Rice
  • British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his foreign policy advisor David Manning, assistant to Blair spokesman Alistair Campbell named Phillip Bassett, Foreign Office communications chief John Williams and British intelligence officials like Sir John Scarlett

Exactly one major news organization refused to pick up pom-poms, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. All the other major outlets, whether they ostensibly catered to Republican or Democratic audiences, sold the war lie.

Max Follmer, The Reporting Team That Got Iraq Right, HuffPost.com.
March 28, 2008, updated May 25, 2011.

And so it continues…

Venezuela

“We’re particularly bad when it comes to regime-change stories, and have seen this just recently.”

Multiple news organizations, including the New York Times, reported forces loyal to Venezuela’s Maduro (our latest regime change target) burned food aid sent by Western humanitarian convoys. It turned out the opposition burned the cargo. A CNN reporter said it was a “classic case of how misinformation spreads… from an unconfirmed rumor… to the mass media,” failing to realize the screwup started when a CNN crew claimed they saw the burning episode.

This slapstick idiocy was like something out of Evelyn Waugh. It was so bad the Onion ran a story called, “New York Times Corrects Story By Admitting They Burned Venezuelan Aid Convoy.”

Political Smears

This week Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote a smear job¹ of former-journalist David Sirota, recently hired as a speech writer for Bernie Sander’s 2020 presidential campaign. This hit job was published in The Atlantic. This is part of their ongoing political assassination of the US political Left by the mainstream establishment media. Even though the foundational arguments of the article have been discredited and its timeline determined to be fictional,² neither Dovere or The Atlantic have published a retraction. Even though Dovere himself states elsewhere that his recount is a “fuzzy overlap of Sirota’s unofficial work for Sanders with his presenting himself as an independent journalist.”³

 

¹  Edward-Isaac Dovere, Bernie Sanders Just Hired His Twitter Attack Dog, The Atlantic. March 19, 2019.
²  Glenn Greenwald. The Crux of the Accusations Against David Sirota From the Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere is False. The Intercept. March 23 2019.
³  Edward-Isaac Dovere, From a Bogus Website to Bernie Sanders’s Inner Circle, The Atlantic. March 22, 2019.