HOW A CO-DEPENDENT MEDIA ENABLES A WAR-AHOLIC WHITE HOUSE
Once an independent operator who called herself "Miss Run Amok," (NY Times reporter Judith Miller) disputed what her many critics said was obvious: that Vice President Cheney's former top aide (Scooter Libby) had been trying to manipulate her.
Throughout the afternoon, an unspoken question hung in the air: What do journalists give up when they agree to protect high officials in exchange for juicy information?
…Miller described how her relationship with Libby began: with a bit of flattery…
--"Journalist Forced to Reveal Her Methods," Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, January 31, 2007
Everything about my nine-month stint at cable news channel MSNBC occurred in the context of the ever-intensifying war drums over Iraq. The drums grew louder as D-Day approached, until the din became so deafening that rational journalistic thinking could not occur. Three weeks before the invasion, MSNBC Suits terminated "Donahue," their most-watched program.
For 19 weeks, I had appeared in on-air debates almost every afternoon--the last weeks heavily focused on Iraq. I adamantly opposed an invasion. I warned that it would "undermine our coalition with Muslim and Arab countries that we need to help us fight Al Qaeda" and would lead to "quagmire."
In October 2002, my debate segments were terminated. There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq--a daily show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. The show featured retired colonels and generals resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pregame analysis.
It was excruciating to be silenced while myth and misinformation went unchallenged. Military analysts typically appeared unopposed; they were presented as experts, not advocates. But their closeness to the Pentagon often obstructed independent, skeptical analysis….
As the war began, CNN news president Eason Jordan admitted that his network's military analysts were government-approved…It's telling that in the run-up to the war, no American TV network hired any on-air analysts from among the experts who questioned White House WMD claims…
As war neared, MSNBC Suits turned the screws even tighter on "Donahue." They decreed that if we booked one guest who was anti-war on Iraq, we needed two who were pro-war. If we booked two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. At one staff meeting, a producer proposed booking Michael Moore and was told she'd need three right-wingers for political balance…
Many in the media who were the loudest and most dramatically wrong about Iraq have not relinquished their war drums. Today, they target Iran and argue vociferously against withdrawal from Iraq. In corporate media, few are held accountable.
--"Inside TV News: We Were Silenced by the Drums of War," Jeff Cohen, former news commentator for CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, as well as senior producer on MSNBC's "Donahue."
"Four of Six Major Papers Left Out Prescient Warnings in Coverage of the 2002 Iraq War Vote"
--headline, Media Matters for America, mediamatters.com, December 6, 2006. The accompanying article features half a dozen Democratic senators and congressman who rose to the floor to protest the vote, but who were never interviewed, quoted, or even mentioned in any of the nation's major newspapers in the run-up to war. Rather, articles often quoted those Democrats who voted FOR the war, as if it were a consensus.
…The vice president ordered a counteroffensive in parts of the press deemed receptive to whatever the administration wanted to dish out concerning (former diplomat Joseph Wilson, whose wife, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA operative by the White House in an attempt to discredit Wilson's claim that the White House case for war was weak). One of the options…recommended to Cheney was an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," because the program's host, Tim Russert, would allow the vice president to "control the message."
(Former Cheney staffer Catherine Martin) suggested that the vice president "leak" information that seemed to undercut Wilson's claim to carefully selected reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post, arranged a lunch for Cheney with right-wing commentators and advised him to avoid the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristoff because he had "attacked the administration fairly regularly."…Libby had been assigned to contact selected reporters deemed receptive to information that might discredit Wilson…and to plant with them anonymously sourced stories…
…The Washington Post's Dana Milbank had the best summation of Martin's testimony: "The trial has already pulled back the curtain on the White House's PR techniques and confirmed some of the darkest suspicions of the reporters upon whom they are used. Relatively junior White House aides run roughshod over members of the president's Cabinet. Bush aides charged with speaking to the public and the media are kept out of the loop on some of the most important issues. And bad news is dumped before the weekend for the sole purpose of burying it."
It's such an amateurish approach to news management, in fact, that you have to wonder how the Bush administration and particularly, Cheney's office, got away with it for as long as they did. If you recall that there always are a certain number of high-level Washington journalists willing to play ball with any form of transparently self-interested deceit for the sake of a Page 1 byline or a few minutes of prime airtime, you don't have to wonder very long.
…There's no particular reason why malfeasant members of the press or those who merely are incompetent should be held in contempt. The news media, after all, are like every American institution, home to its share of idiots, poseurs, slothful time-markers and self-interested time servers. The problem is that Cheney and his former aides aren't simply contemptuous of the individual reporters or even of the press itself. They're contemptuous of the principle under which the free press operates--which is the American people's right to have a reasonable account of what the government does in their name.
The lesson to take away from this week's unintended seminar in contemporary journalism is that the vice president and his staff, acting on behalf of the Bush administration, believe that truth is a malleable adjunct to their ambitions and that they have a well-founded confidence that some members of the Washington press corps will cynically accommodate that belief for the sake of their careers.
It's a sick little arrangement in which the parties clearly have one thing in common: a profound indifference to both the common good and to their obligation to act in its service.
--"Cheney's Staff, and a Useful Press," Tim Rutten in his column, "Regarding Media," L.A. Times, January 27, 2007
There is no way I can top the eloquence and power of Tim Rutten's words, so I won't even try, but it is the absolute best description I have found to describe how a codependent media enables a war-aholic administration.
As American citizens, we not only have a right to the truth, we have an obligation to seek out truth, wherever and whenever we can find it.
That doesn't mean necessarily to read only those publications, listen only to those talk-radio programs, or watch only those cable news commentators who agree with our points of view. It means seeking out FACTS, and making our decisions accordingly.
Boys and girls, I submit to you that it is not merely our obligation, it is our RESPONSIBILITY.
The Bush administration freely and cynically manipulated the media in getting out its war propaganda, and they continue to do so to this day. That the media, as a rule, now feels chastised over their egregious failure to question this war does not in any means insinuate that they have learned from their mistakes and vow never to make them again--as Frank Rich points out:
The most important lies to watch for now are the new ones being reiterated daily by the administration's top brass, from Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney on down. You know fiasco awaits America when everyone in the White House is reading in unison from the same fictional script, as they did back in the day when "mushroom clouds" and "uranium from Africa" were the daily drumbeat.
The latest lies are custom-made to prop up the new "way forward" that is anything but…All of this replays 2003, when the White House refused to consider any plan, including existing ones in the Pentagon and State Department bureaucracies, for coping with a broken post-Saddam Iraq. Then, as at every stage of the war since, the only administration plan was for a propaganda campaign to bamboozle American voters into believing "victory" was just around the corner.
…It's incumbent on all those talking heads who fell for "shock and awe" and "Mission Accomplished" in 2003 to not let history repeat itself in 2007. Facing the truth is the only way forward in Iraq.
--"Lying Like It's 2003," Frank Rich, New York Times, January 21, 2007
And…just so you know…the lies don't stop with Iraq. I won't even get into the attempt by the American Enterprise Institute--a right-wing "think-tank" funded by Exxon Mobile who put Bush in the White House and started this war--offered $10,000 bribes to any scientists who were willing to refute the recent finding of 2000 scientists from all over the globe that global warming not only exists, but has been caused by man and their insatiable appetite for carbon fuels--like the kind enriching and fattening up Exxon Mobile as we speak. (They had the highest profits--over $37 BILLION IN ONE QUARTER --of all time, this year.)
(So far--no takers that we know of.)
Nor am I going to get into all the other flat-out unbelievable whoppers this administration has peddled in every branch of government because I just don't have the gigabyte space.
I'm only going to mention one word: IRAN.
As President Bush and his aides calibrate how directly to confront Iran, they are discovering that both their words and their strategy are haunted by the echoes of four years ago--when their warnings of terrorist activity and nuclear ambitions were clearly a prelude to war.
This time, they insist, it's different.
--"On Iran, Bush Faces Haunting Echoes of Iraq," David E. Sanger, Washington Post, January 28, 2007
There is only one difference I want to see this time: That the media, and by extension, the American people, don't buy it. Not again.
It's time to stage an intervention with this president and his war-mongering buddies. Understand that addicts lie and addicts manipulate. It's time to confront them with the truth.
Otherwise…once an addict…always an addict…looking for their next fix.
Throughout the afternoon, an unspoken question hung in the air: What do journalists give up when they agree to protect high officials in exchange for juicy information?
…Miller described how her relationship with Libby began: with a bit of flattery…
--"Journalist Forced to Reveal Her Methods," Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, January 31, 2007
Everything about my nine-month stint at cable news channel MSNBC occurred in the context of the ever-intensifying war drums over Iraq. The drums grew louder as D-Day approached, until the din became so deafening that rational journalistic thinking could not occur. Three weeks before the invasion, MSNBC Suits terminated "Donahue," their most-watched program.
For 19 weeks, I had appeared in on-air debates almost every afternoon--the last weeks heavily focused on Iraq. I adamantly opposed an invasion. I warned that it would "undermine our coalition with Muslim and Arab countries that we need to help us fight Al Qaeda" and would lead to "quagmire."
In October 2002, my debate segments were terminated. There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq--a daily show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. The show featured retired colonels and generals resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pregame analysis.
It was excruciating to be silenced while myth and misinformation went unchallenged. Military analysts typically appeared unopposed; they were presented as experts, not advocates. But their closeness to the Pentagon often obstructed independent, skeptical analysis….
As the war began, CNN news president Eason Jordan admitted that his network's military analysts were government-approved…It's telling that in the run-up to the war, no American TV network hired any on-air analysts from among the experts who questioned White House WMD claims…
As war neared, MSNBC Suits turned the screws even tighter on "Donahue." They decreed that if we booked one guest who was anti-war on Iraq, we needed two who were pro-war. If we booked two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. At one staff meeting, a producer proposed booking Michael Moore and was told she'd need three right-wingers for political balance…
Many in the media who were the loudest and most dramatically wrong about Iraq have not relinquished their war drums. Today, they target Iran and argue vociferously against withdrawal from Iraq. In corporate media, few are held accountable.
--"Inside TV News: We Were Silenced by the Drums of War," Jeff Cohen, former news commentator for CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, as well as senior producer on MSNBC's "Donahue."
"Four of Six Major Papers Left Out Prescient Warnings in Coverage of the 2002 Iraq War Vote"
--headline, Media Matters for America, mediamatters.com, December 6, 2006. The accompanying article features half a dozen Democratic senators and congressman who rose to the floor to protest the vote, but who were never interviewed, quoted, or even mentioned in any of the nation's major newspapers in the run-up to war. Rather, articles often quoted those Democrats who voted FOR the war, as if it were a consensus.
…The vice president ordered a counteroffensive in parts of the press deemed receptive to whatever the administration wanted to dish out concerning (former diplomat Joseph Wilson, whose wife, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA operative by the White House in an attempt to discredit Wilson's claim that the White House case for war was weak). One of the options…recommended to Cheney was an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," because the program's host, Tim Russert, would allow the vice president to "control the message."
(Former Cheney staffer Catherine Martin) suggested that the vice president "leak" information that seemed to undercut Wilson's claim to carefully selected reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post, arranged a lunch for Cheney with right-wing commentators and advised him to avoid the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristoff because he had "attacked the administration fairly regularly."…Libby had been assigned to contact selected reporters deemed receptive to information that might discredit Wilson…and to plant with them anonymously sourced stories…
…The Washington Post's Dana Milbank had the best summation of Martin's testimony: "The trial has already pulled back the curtain on the White House's PR techniques and confirmed some of the darkest suspicions of the reporters upon whom they are used. Relatively junior White House aides run roughshod over members of the president's Cabinet. Bush aides charged with speaking to the public and the media are kept out of the loop on some of the most important issues. And bad news is dumped before the weekend for the sole purpose of burying it."
It's such an amateurish approach to news management, in fact, that you have to wonder how the Bush administration and particularly, Cheney's office, got away with it for as long as they did. If you recall that there always are a certain number of high-level Washington journalists willing to play ball with any form of transparently self-interested deceit for the sake of a Page 1 byline or a few minutes of prime airtime, you don't have to wonder very long.
…There's no particular reason why malfeasant members of the press or those who merely are incompetent should be held in contempt. The news media, after all, are like every American institution, home to its share of idiots, poseurs, slothful time-markers and self-interested time servers. The problem is that Cheney and his former aides aren't simply contemptuous of the individual reporters or even of the press itself. They're contemptuous of the principle under which the free press operates--which is the American people's right to have a reasonable account of what the government does in their name.
The lesson to take away from this week's unintended seminar in contemporary journalism is that the vice president and his staff, acting on behalf of the Bush administration, believe that truth is a malleable adjunct to their ambitions and that they have a well-founded confidence that some members of the Washington press corps will cynically accommodate that belief for the sake of their careers.
It's a sick little arrangement in which the parties clearly have one thing in common: a profound indifference to both the common good and to their obligation to act in its service.
--"Cheney's Staff, and a Useful Press," Tim Rutten in his column, "Regarding Media," L.A. Times, January 27, 2007
There is no way I can top the eloquence and power of Tim Rutten's words, so I won't even try, but it is the absolute best description I have found to describe how a codependent media enables a war-aholic administration.
As American citizens, we not only have a right to the truth, we have an obligation to seek out truth, wherever and whenever we can find it.
That doesn't mean necessarily to read only those publications, listen only to those talk-radio programs, or watch only those cable news commentators who agree with our points of view. It means seeking out FACTS, and making our decisions accordingly.
Boys and girls, I submit to you that it is not merely our obligation, it is our RESPONSIBILITY.
The Bush administration freely and cynically manipulated the media in getting out its war propaganda, and they continue to do so to this day. That the media, as a rule, now feels chastised over their egregious failure to question this war does not in any means insinuate that they have learned from their mistakes and vow never to make them again--as Frank Rich points out:
The most important lies to watch for now are the new ones being reiterated daily by the administration's top brass, from Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney on down. You know fiasco awaits America when everyone in the White House is reading in unison from the same fictional script, as they did back in the day when "mushroom clouds" and "uranium from Africa" were the daily drumbeat.
The latest lies are custom-made to prop up the new "way forward" that is anything but…All of this replays 2003, when the White House refused to consider any plan, including existing ones in the Pentagon and State Department bureaucracies, for coping with a broken post-Saddam Iraq. Then, as at every stage of the war since, the only administration plan was for a propaganda campaign to bamboozle American voters into believing "victory" was just around the corner.
…It's incumbent on all those talking heads who fell for "shock and awe" and "Mission Accomplished" in 2003 to not let history repeat itself in 2007. Facing the truth is the only way forward in Iraq.
--"Lying Like It's 2003," Frank Rich, New York Times, January 21, 2007
And…just so you know…the lies don't stop with Iraq. I won't even get into the attempt by the American Enterprise Institute--a right-wing "think-tank" funded by Exxon Mobile who put Bush in the White House and started this war--offered $10,000 bribes to any scientists who were willing to refute the recent finding of 2000 scientists from all over the globe that global warming not only exists, but has been caused by man and their insatiable appetite for carbon fuels--like the kind enriching and fattening up Exxon Mobile as we speak. (They had the highest profits--over $37 BILLION IN ONE QUARTER --of all time, this year.)
(So far--no takers that we know of.)
Nor am I going to get into all the other flat-out unbelievable whoppers this administration has peddled in every branch of government because I just don't have the gigabyte space.
I'm only going to mention one word: IRAN.
As President Bush and his aides calibrate how directly to confront Iran, they are discovering that both their words and their strategy are haunted by the echoes of four years ago--when their warnings of terrorist activity and nuclear ambitions were clearly a prelude to war.
This time, they insist, it's different.
--"On Iran, Bush Faces Haunting Echoes of Iraq," David E. Sanger, Washington Post, January 28, 2007
There is only one difference I want to see this time: That the media, and by extension, the American people, don't buy it. Not again.
It's time to stage an intervention with this president and his war-mongering buddies. Understand that addicts lie and addicts manipulate. It's time to confront them with the truth.
Otherwise…once an addict…always an addict…looking for their next fix.
posted by Deanie Mills at 1:27 PM
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