It began with a triumphant explosion of hype. MSNBC. CNN. CNBC. Fox News. 72% of the Iraqi people registered to vote cast a ballot! 92% of expatriate Iraqis voted! (No qualifiers, no asterixes.) Conservative bloggers and pundits crowed! Purple fingers were waved in Congress during the SOTU address! But.... let the truth auction begin.
Sunday and 72%!... Can I have a big headline of... -AHA! 72 Percent Turn-Out!
<Bang!>
-Thank You sir, the Reporter in the tan suit from Fox News and the chubby fellow from MSNBC!
<Bang!>
Now... Ladies and Gentleman... Do I hear Monday and 65%! 65 Percent Polling Turn-Out in a major report! Yes!
<Bang!>
To the lady from the tired old NY warhorse in the Green! I thank you for your speculation! Does any body have another bid?
<Bang!>
Tuesday at 57%! WOW! Thank you, sir! A major under-bid on Turn-Out! Thank you! Thank you!
Editor and Publisher Story
I didn't think I could get anymore cynical.
But its happened. Again. Lies and speculations as truth reported without question. If it has anything to do with Iraq, and the Bush administration's foreign policy, something has to give. The truth has to start leaking out like light through a blanket of canvas. The mythology is falling away in the face of the truth faster than the dye on fat purple dyed fingers in DC can fade. The election was Sunday. Its Friday now. Yet, all of the triumphantism is fading into what actually occured in less than a week. Another narrative pushed on the American people by the White House and the Corporate Media is beginning to crumble into reality with each passing day. With no computerized records, no way of knowing just who, and how many people had actually voted in Iraq last Sunday... the figure of 72% was blared like a trumpet. It was a lie of convenience to push a narrative. Pulled out of somebody's ass and plastered up to heaven like the gospel. Yet, each day since Sunday... the figures have changed... less each day... and the previous days figures have... vanished. As if they were never reported. I know the Bushies lie. I know the media is weak and compliant. But they keep finding new ways to shock me with just how craven and useless they really are. And I kept waiting for somebody to bodly come out and 'say something' about how Sunday was handled as the numbers ticked down each day.
72%... 65%.... 60%.... 57%...
I'm sorry... the Iraqi elections weren't impressive enough? The truth... that you just don't know what the actual voting numbers are yet... isn't valid enough to report? So the numbers uncomfortably tick down, and the issue of the absolute puffery is left dangling like food stuck in the teeth of somebody sitting in front of you. Tell me, Bush apologists and GOP scammers... why did so many people have to take what was already an impressive and wonderful story... and fraudulently blow up the numbers to make it a mythological triumph that never happened? The truth was impressive enough. But because the truth is inconvenient when a story needs to be told, or a narrative needs to be set, you just... make shit up? How does this artificial inflation jibe with the legacy of journalistic truthtelling in men like Edward R. Murrow? Since conservatives are busy trying to co-opt him for their own gain: when the Great Dr. Martin Luther King spoke on the Mall in Washington DC in front of tens of tens of thousands of people gathered by the reflection pool... would it have made his triumph more impressive by saying that legions totaling 50 million people as far as eye could see witnessed his speech there in person with him? Even though that just wasn't the truth? Of course not. The history of his words, and his supporters actions, were enough to raise mankind's spirit with the truth alone. The truth is... you didn't know how many people voted in Sunday's election... so if you were going to 'make shit up' it might as well be 'Bush-shit' to play with the latest White House line. History couldn't just be history, reported with a professional detachment, it needed a little 'help'.
UPDATE: Officials Back Away from Early Estimates of Iraqi Voter Turnout
Everyone is delighted that so many Iraqis went to the polls on Sunday, but do the two turnout numbers routinely cited by the press -- 8 million and 57% -- have any basis in reality? And was the outpouring of voters in Sunni areas really "surprisingly strong"?
By Greg Mitchell
(February 02, 2005) -- Everyone, of course, is thrilled that so many Iraqis turned out to vote, in the face of threats and intimidation, on Sunday. But in hailing, and at times gushing, over the turnout, has the American media (as it did two years ago in the hyping of Saddam's WMDs) forgotten core journalistic principles in regard to fact-checking and weighing partisan assertions?
It appears so. For days, the press repeated, as gospel, assertions offered by an election official that 8 million Iraqis went to the polls on Sunday, an impressive 57% turnout rate. I questioned those figures as early as last Sunday, and offered the detailed analysis below on Wednesday. Now, John Burns and Dexter Filkins of The New York Times report in Friday's paper that Iraqi election officials have quietly "backtracked, saying that the 8 million estimate had been reached hastily on the basis of telephone reports from polling stations across the country and that the figure could change."
God bless Mr. Mitchell for writing a critical piece, even if I did have to go digging for it. But the figures were a hell of a lot higher than that on election day and early on in the week, and they are falling by the day. And what really creeps me out... is that its like the higher numbers were never reported without any warnings or qualifiers. I know because the same ugly people who preened that I 'must be in hell, because of course I wanted Zarqawi to kill thousands and ruin the elections' just because I disagree with the President's reckless foreign policy trolled me so. Often. With each glowingly false media report. The media also quoted expatriate voting figures and routinely ignored that fact that actual registered expatriates was just a fraction of the total number of actual Iraqis outside of Iraq. The numbers dripped down like coffee drops through an automatic coffee maker in the morning day by day.
Somehow, no matter how many times he proves himself to be a hack, Howard Kurtz needs to be dragged into the discussion to show how much of a mess and a miss this was. As if he could be counted on for any consistency whatsoever. And, yet again, I am struck by how completely this whole mess is almost all put on nameless 'Iraqi Election Officials'... as if they didn't have a bias that a good journalist would realize had to be accounted for.
To put it clearly: If say, for example, 50,000 residents of a city registered and 25,000 voted, that would seem like a very respectable 50% turnout, by one standard. But if the adult population of the city was 150,000, then the actual turnout of 16% would look quite different.
"Election officials concede they did not have a reliable baseline on which to calculate turnout," Kurtz concluded.
He also quoted Democratic strategist Robert Weiner as saying: "It's an amazing media error, a huge blunder. I'm sure the Bush administration is thrilled by this spin."
So they screwed it all up. Big time. But, it wasn't just an 'amazing media error', I don't believe that at all. It was a blatantly apparent pure and old-fashioned pack of rah-rah bullshit that played to the Bush Politboro's narrative.
It's a big difference. Since Sunday, countless TV talking heads, such as Chris Matthews, and print pundits have compared the Iraq turnout favorably to U.S. national elections, not seeming to understand that 80%-90% of our registered voters usually turn out. The problem in our country is that so few people bother to register, bringing our overall turnout numbers way down.
Yes. I suppose we could believe that it was an 'accident', like Chris Matthews just wet his intellectual diaper. Every day. For a week. But the sad fact of it is, when there is an American election, the empty-suit pundit class can't wait to bombard us with the whole phone book of researched statistics about how much we don't vote as a people, because of how few people, compared with the population as a whole, are actually registering to vote and then going and doing so. They know exactly what they are talking about... its just a different narrative that the one they wanted to preen over during the Iraq elections. Then, as the figures were uncomfortably revised down, they just... let the previous days nonsense... go. Poof! Into the either.
I know the trolling scum of the world are going to pimp lies and exaggerations at me without any consequences. They have been doing that since November of 2000, and it is a part of their nature, and the Bushies nature, to excuse away lies, distortions, and inaccuracies to me and other people they disagree with simply because I don't agree with them and, therefore, its no 'sin' to lie to me. I know that the corporate media is made up of a bunch of people practically serving as Bush administration press aids and that they barely bother to hide their biases anymore. But still, they all find a way to make me more cynical. They didn't even try to hide the pom-poms on this one.
After the WMDs. Oil will be 20 dollars a barrel. The war will pay for itself. Losing hundreds of tons of explosives from an unsecured bunker. Slam Dunk. The Smoking Gun as a Mushroom Cloud. Bremer's 9 Billion dollar loss being forgotten while the UN must be gutted for 'Oil for Food'. Destroying Scott Ritter's reputation by setting him up in a phony 'chatroom child molester' sting. Abu Graib. Guantanamo Bay. Torture Memos. Secret torture flights in the middle of the night to Syria and Egypt. Clark's book. Yellow cake. Niger. Chalabi. The Neocons. Valarie Plame. Novak. AIPAC spy case. Cakewalk followed by heralded as liberators and gone. And now... after all that... that the 72% of the population voting figure is debunked in less than a week and ignored with nary a furrowed brow? That almost 3/4 of the population figure was what spawned all that pre-school purple finger-wagging. It wouldn't have happened if 40% of the population had voted. That figure's height, it was implied, meant that if you questioned the figure... you were smeared as an embittered dead-ender who wanted people to die because you hated Bush so much you were for the terrorists by the echochamber.
I used to think of reporters as being more cynical than private detectives in old novels. After 9/11 I thought that cult members standing in front of a vat of red KoolAid that smells bad enough to peel paint were less gullible that journalists today. Now... I find myself just hoping that by next week the lies and nonsense will bottom out shy of a 'worst case scenario' figure of 'not mentioning' that the Iraqi election turn out hasn't fallen to 30 or 40% voter turn out, and that the Shi-ite Clerics who won are gleefully crafting the Shi-ara law based "constitution" of the Islamic Republic of Iraq.
But that opening day figure counting down day to day... 72%... 65%.... 60%.... 57%... and juxtaposing that with the image of plump sausage little fingers painted purple and waived for nothing shy of personal gain. Its a new low or new lows.
I don't know where Edward R. Murrow is buried, but I have given up thinking that he is spinning in his grave. I am just going to look for the glow on the horizon coming from his body spontaniously becoming a rage and fusion-based sun liquifying the ground beneath his headstone. When we have our own mass media cable news outlet... because you can't win a gunfight with bows and arrows... and it makes Fox News look as mean as the Phil Donohue show... I'll remember these days. Days when I have to laugh now whenever I hear a member of the echochamber talk about how 'mean' we are, how 'vicious', how 'cruel'.
If they really, truly believe that then they are totally handicapped and unprepared for the fight to come. Because the real payback, when we start coming at them like they have been coming at us, is going to be a bitch.