Shorter time...if you want more background and grist for discussion, read my other diary entries (they're long, sorry).
Reporter Apologizes for Iraq Coverage
In the article that I reproduce below, an editor and reporter for a small newspaper has stepped forward.
That brave soul is on the inside of the media machine, and is telling us all something very very important.
With Rick Mercier's words in mind, and with other work from Editor and Publisher in hand, take another look at my proposal (found in my earlier diary entries.
It is workable, legal, possible, and urgent.
The media, by default or by design, is complicit, compliant, culpable, and crassly subservient to the war machine.
The New Pravda, as Billmon (oh how I miss him even for a day!) so succinctly puts it, is not a joking snippet of café-table repartée. It is a reality.
I am currently reading a personal account written by a Chinese women who was born just after the Revolution/Civil War in 1949, entitled Wild Swans by Jung Chang. Her descriptions of the Cultural Revolution, specifically with respect to the use of the media organs to trumpet the latest party line...and even more specifically two passages from the book...
"[A philosophy teacher and party official] had underlined bits of [students'] essays hich he thought were particularly well-written. Now these disconnected parts were joined together by his pupils to form an obviously nonsensical passage which the wall posters [political propaganda] claimed was anti-Mao. I learned years later that this method of concocting an accusation through the arbitrary linking of unconnected sentences had started as early as 1955, the year my mother [also a party official] suffered her first detention under the Communists, when some writers used [this methodology] to attack their fellow writers"
found on page 371 (HarperCollins, Flamingo, 1992 paperback edition)
Such tactics, employed on a widespread basis, resulted in the following...
"...we had been overwhlemed by deceptive rhetoric, disinformation, and hypocrisy, which made it virtually impossible to see through the situation and to forma an intelligent judgement"
found on page 404 (HarperCollins, Flamingo, 1992 paperback edition)
Read the above two passages. Then go check out Josh Marshall's succinct analysis of exactly that same technique...using an OLD Fox News article with the following quoted passage...
"You've got a real credibility problem," John Lehman, former Navy secretary under President Reagan, told Clarke, calling the witness "an active partisan selling a book."
Clarke responded: "I don't think it's a question of morality at all, I think it's a question of politics."
Now go look at the NEW Fox News article and compare.
Try to find a retraction or editorial admission of error...
Now compare to this (official transcript, via the NYTimes).
Another example, preserved only by screenshot can be found at Take Back The Media. An incomplete transcript, missing 750 critical words was published on CNN's website, and remained there for two days. Then the online transcript, but not the Google cache was change, with nary a word or mention of any omissions...later, the google cache was changed as well..again with no word or mention of any omissions.
We are dealing with Neo-Maoists who are well on their way to concocting a modern "Cult of Personality" and could, under the right circumstances, spark a New Cultural Revolution...in America. The media is either tacitly participating through incompetence, fear or laziness...or is complicit, both passively and actively.
Majasblog has an excellent series of essays on exactly that issue.
Reporter Apologizes for Iraq Coverage
By E&P Staff
Published: March 29, 2004
NEW YORK In the wake of Richard Clarke's dramatic personal apology to the families of 9/11 victims last week -- on behalf of himself and his government -- for failing to prevent the terrorist attacks, one might expect at least a few mea culpas related to the release of false information on the Iraq threat before and after the war.
This has not happened so far, with President Bush on Wednesday going so far as to joke about the missing weapons of mass destruction at a correspondents dinner in Washington.
While the major media, from The New York Times on down, has largely remained silent about their own failings in this area, a young columnist for a small paper in Fredericksburg, Va., has stepped forward.
"The media are finished with their big blowouts on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and there is one thing they forgot to say: We're sorry," Rick Mercier wrote, in a column published Sunday in The Free Lance-Star.
"Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage. Sorry we were dismissive of experts who disputed White House charges against Iraq. Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell for Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations. Sorry we couldn't bring ourselves to hold the administration's feet to the fire before the war, when it really mattered.
"Maybe we'll do a better job next war."
Mercier admitted that it was "absurd to receive this apology from a person so low in the media hierarchy. You really ought to be getting it from the editors and reporters at the agenda-setting publications, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post."
Mercier, an editor and writer at the newspaper who writes a column two or three times a month, told E&P that the column was sparked by what he saw as "a need for accountability and reflection" given the seriousness of the current conflict in Iraq and the failure to find WMDs there or a strong Saddam link to al Qaeda. He saw little of that soul-searching in the one-year anniversary coverage. "By neglecting to fully employ their critical-thinking faculties, the media not only failed their readers and viewers, they failed our democracy," Mercier said.
Concluding his column, Mercier declared, "there's no excusing that failure. The only thing that can be said is, Sorry."