War Powers, War Lies: Part 21: Day Late, Dollar Short
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War Powers, War Lies: A Series: Part XXI: Day Late, Dollar Short
As we have seen, in the contest for control of the nation’s powers to start and to wage wars, the Executive usually wins. The Framers dealt Congress a hand basically limited to the power to declare wars (not anticipating today’s world where wars are never declared by anyone) and the power of the purse (which cannot effectively be exercised to rein in existing wars because it leaves troops unsupported). Such generic cards are routinely trumped by the President, expressly made the commander-in-chief. The Supreme Court seldom gets in the game, even when it manifestly should. The Founders would have been surprised at the lopsidedness of the contest, but over the last two hundred years, we as a nation have become inured to the Executive outgunning the other branches on this issue. The Founders might have been even more surprised, however, at the toothlessness of the Press.
James Madison, author of the First Amendment, clearly saw the electorate as the ultimate counterweight to any branch of government, and the Press as the essential empowerer of the electorate. He famously wrote: “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both.” The Press is a primary “means of acquiring” that “popular information.” Justice Hugo Black, in the “Pentagon Papers” case, New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), made the point more explicitly, and in a wartime context to boot:
The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.
Freedom of the press, then, was devised in effect to render the Press nearly a fourth branch of government, and – in matters of war – to give it, as the electorate’s tribune, the right and in Justice Black’s words, “the duty” to inquire into and report upon the doings and the lies of the government. When the Legislative and the Judiciary fail us, the Press is supposed to be the failsafe against deceit that sends us into reckless wars.
So, as the band Smash Mouth asked, “What the hell happened?” Where was the Press when, as discussed in many earlier pieces in this series, the government told lie after lie to inveigle us into a war that can best be characterized using James Madison’s exact phrase: “a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both.” (Well, scratch the “perhaps” part.) The answer is that the Press was mostly AWOL from its constitutional responsibilities. And the electorate, unprotected by its supposed guardians, was left to swallow the lies whole.
One would have thought that, with two centuries of progressive inoculation of the country against sedition laws (discussed in earlier columns) – just as Madison no doubt intended, the Press would have felt perfectly free to find out and tell the truth, to warn of the oncoming White House lies like Paul Revere sounding the alarm against the approaching redcoats. And the Press was free, but in the end that freedom counted for next to nothing, until it was too late.
This was not an accident. It was the culmination of a generation of newly sophisticated mechanisms of press control, what Michael Wolff has called “the great conservative message apparatus”: a multi-level, multi-pronged machine for putting out the chosen story, and drowning out all others.
At the bottom is the cheap, sleazy and multifarious agitprop underworld described by David Brock in his memoir of life within it, Blinded by the Right (2002), during which he put out hatchet job “biographies” of Anita Hill and Hilary Clinton; the Swift Boaters are a more recent and notorious manifestation. Also inhabiting the bottom are the make-believe journalists seeded throughout the media, e.g. Jeff Gannon, the pseudonymous rent boy mysteriously issued White House press credentials and used to toss softball questions at George Bush in press conferences, and flacks Armstrong Williams, Karen Ryan, Michael McManus, and Maggie Gallagher, each on the government payroll while posing as a journalist in newspapers and on television, promoting the Bush agenda. Add also the fake news reporting done by the Pentagon writing stories for republication as news in Iraqi newspapers, brought to light in 2005.
In the middle are the explicitly right-wing media, the Bill O’Reillys and Rush Limbaughs, who populate “Angry White Male” radio and Fox News, and their somewhat more refined brethren at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, whose real product is often not news or commentary but an attitude, specifically an attitude toward the mainstream media (frequently called by their initials “MSM”). That attitude is one of embattled righteous indignation. The attitude is a tactic, more sophisticated than may at first appear, to “decertify” the press in the public eye, as Jay Rosen former journalism chair at NYU put it. The goal is, as Salon columnist Eric Boehlert summarized in his recent book Lapdogs (2006): “to create a news culture where there are few if any agreed upon facts, therefore making serious debate impossible.”
When it comes to the top, i.e. the part of the government that interfaces with the press, most typically through background briefings and leaks, the message is even clearer. A White House aide, probably Karl Rove, told author Ron Suskind in 2004 that “a judicious study of discernable reality” is “not the way the world really works anymore… We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” So much for facts; so much for what Rove (?) scornfully called “the reality-based community.”
The typical right-wing knock on the MSM is that it is “liberal,” meaning that it proceeds with a “liberal” bias, and thus with a bias. These are two separate accusations. The first attributes to the MSM a series of attitudes known as “liberal,” a term whose meaning is now somewhat vague but which certainly includes things like multilateralism, concern for the ecology, resistance to Evangelical hegemonism, and skepticism toward military solutions to national problems. These attitudes, thought to be bad things, are attributed without much evidence to the practitioners of mainstream journalism. And at that point, the second accusation becomes viable, namely, that since the MSM proceed from a bias, the objectivity of their reporting, and hence the accuracy of what they report, including but not limited to reports of governmental dishonesty about war and peace, may be rejected out of had by reasonable voters.
But what is the real record here? The truth is that the MSM have been coopted and cowed, and do not articulate “liberal” views or evidence a “liberal” bias, and, unfortunately, probably partly owing to the success of the right-wing attacks, when it came to George Bush’s wars, failed to report what they knew, investigate what they should investigate, or give proper context to their reasonable suspicions for a very long time.
Some specifics. And here I acknowledge I rely entirely on Boehlert’s Lapdogs and Frank Rich’s book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold (2006) for a few representative examples (and I am only scratching the surface):
$ Regarding WMD, Judith Miller of the Times, in 2001, during the run-up to the war, provided crucial credibility to the tall tales of Iraqi defector Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, who claimed to have worked on renovated biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground sites. Later she reported on the “aluminum tubes” red herring (tubes supposedly useful only as centrifuges for uranium refinement). This story was enormously influential in swaying public opinion. (If the “liberal” Times said it, it had to be true, surely.) Members of the scientific community immediately stepped forward to challenge the tubes story. Miller refused to run their doubts. Miller kept on believing in WMD long after sanity had prevailed in most of the media. Miller became, in general, such an Administration pet that she ultimately went to jail to protect Scooter Libby as a confidential source in the White House effort to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had told the truth about phony White House intelligence suggesting Niger uranium sales to Iraq.
$ On March 7, 2003, the authoritative Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, suggested strongly that the documents whose contents Wilson had denounced were forged. The White House press corps failed to ask a single question about Baradei’s remarks until March 14, five press briefings later.
$ In February 2003 alone, the Washington Post editorialized in favor of going to war nine times (after fifteen additional favorable editorials in the preceding five months).
$ In October 2002, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, former head of Central Command in the Middle East, gave the keynote speech at a meeting of the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank, in which he warned that war was unnecessary, and that Saddam was containable. The Post buried the story on Page 16.
$ According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a watchdog group, of the 393 people interviewed on-camera for network news reports about the upcoming war in the month before the Iraq invasion, only 6 percent expressed skepticism. But then, according to media analyst Andrew Tyndall, of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS from September 2002 till February 2003, almost all could be traced to Administration sources. The mainstream television news coverage was a 24-hour Bush Administration propaganda-fest.
$ MSNBC fired Phil Donahue, whose show had the best rating on the network, in early 2003 in the wake of an internal NBC memo pointing out that its media rivals were waving the flag about the war and Donahue was a doubting liberal.
$ CNN cleared with the Pentagon the retired generals it planned to use as on-air commentators during the war.
$ The MSM consistently and outrageously downplayed the existence and strength of the U.S. antiwar movement. On October 26, 2004, more than 100,000 people gathered in Washington to protest the war. The Times covered it in a small story on Page 8, falsely stating that it “fewer people … than organizers had said they hoped for.” The Post covered it halfway down the front page of the Metro Section, with what ombudsman Michael Getler called “a couple of ho-hum photographs that captured the protest’s fringe elements.” When Cindy Sheehan set up her August 2005 vigil outside the President’s home in Crawford, she was initially ignored. Boehlert points up this startling figure: between August 5 and August 8 CNN mentioned her eight times – and Britney Spears eighteen times. When Sheehan led a protest in Washington on September 24 which drew between 100,000 and 200,000 participants, the MSM effectively ignored her, opting to lavish coverage on Hurricane Rita, which was nowhere near as destructive or dangerous as Hurricane Katrina a few weeks earlier, and in many ways a less important story than the protest.
$ Even Bob Woodward, the man whose typewriter had been so instrumental in bringing down Richard Nixon, was sucked in. His notable contributions during the war were a trilogy of books about the Bush White House, the product of an extraordinary degree of access. For the first two books, Bush at War (2002) and Plan of Attack (2004), almost nothing derogatory, nothing revelatory of the concerted campaign of deceit, came out. A first-class muckraker had been turned into a lapdog. The third volume, State of Denial (2006) no longer maintains the worshipful tone, but has only demoted Bush and his war cabinet to a crew of self-deluded incompetents, and still fails to acknowledge the amoral deceit which is their hallmark in selling the war.
And the MSM is still being lambasted for being too “liberal.”
Naturally, you can only fool all of the people some of the time. Katrina seems to have been the tipping point in the Press’s largely free ride for the Administration’s war lies. But the tameness of the MSM, the going-along with stage-managed presidential press conferences, the acceptance of flacks as commentators, and the silencing of dissenting voices, delayed that moment, which should have arrived before the first soldier set foot in Iraq. Now we are in the hole to the tune of thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and, very possibly, a lost place at the center of the history of this century.
Way to go, Fourth Estate!
Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn
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