Paul Farhi
The headline on a story (3/22/13) by Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi:
On Iraq, Journalists Didn’t Fail. They Just Didn’t Succeed.
To make that case, though, he has to redefine “failure” so far down that it’s hardly possible to avoid failing.
“Thousands of news stories and columns published before the war described and debated the administration’s plans and statements, and not all of them were supportive,” he says. I suppose the North Korean media might fail by that standard, but few others.
“It wasn’t impossible for skeptics of the war to connect the dots,” writes Fahri. It was not actually like the dystopian novel 1984, where every scrap of contrary information went down the Memory Hole!
You know what, Paul Farhi? Skeptics are aware that it was possible to “connect the dots,” because they did so, in real time—citing the same exceptional journalists whom you now cite to prove that the media as a whole were doing their job.
But the real job of the media is not to sprinkle 1 percent truth amidst 99 percent bullshit, so that diligent researchers can search it out like Easter eggs. The job of the media is to present information so that when when its audience consumes it in the usual manner, that audience can get some sense of what reality is like. By this basic standard, the corporate media failed.
Walter Pincus
Farhi trots out journalists’ old, tired excuses for this failure: Condoleezza Rice’s talk of mushroom clouds and Colin Powell’s entirely dubious claims about WMDs “turned everyone irrational,” says the Post‘s Walter Pincus. “The consensus was universal,” says the L.A. Times‘ Doyle McManus. Even if such claims were true, which they patently aren’t, what else would you call a media system that responds to a crisis with irrational groupthink but a failure?
A comforting streak of fatalism runs through Farhi’s piece. The idea that “a more confrontational press could have stopped the march into Iraq” is “wishful thinking,” he writes; it implies that “the media could single-handedly override the president’s influence and that of other leaders.” Former Post executive editor Leonard “Downie believes that no amount of media skepticism would have stopped the administration. ‘We were going to war,’ he said.”
You may have thought that corporate media outlets that are read, watched and listened to by cumulatively tens of millions of people are powerful shapers of public opinion—turns out no. How comforting the belief in the media’s powerlessness must be to people who would otherwise fear they shared responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
But Farhi does not just dispute that journalists have the power to change history; he has doubts about the ability of journalists to do journalism. Quoting Pincus again: “If there’s disagreement inside the government about what’s true and what isn’t, how the hell can the press determine what’s true?”
It’s the kind of statement that makes me wonder why the Washington Post doesn’t close up shop and recommend that people log in instead to the White House blog. If journalists can’t tell truth from falsehood, or at least move us closer in that direction, what are they doing besides reformatting press releases?
Colin Powell at the UN
But it’s really not impossible to distinguish credible from incredible claims. During his press-addling WMD performance, Colin Powell declared:
It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX…. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s late son-in-law.
But as Newsweek (2/24/03) reported, Kamel had also said that “Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.” Who quotes evidence so selectively—and deceptively? Someone who’s lying, that’s who (FAIR Media Advisory, 2/27/03).
Or take Pincus’ piece from March 16, 2003, “U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms,” the most on-point of the Post pieces cited by Farhi to make his case that the Post‘s pre-war performance “doesn’t sound like failure.” Even this piece didn’t come out and say that anyone thought there were no WMDs to be found—only that “U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden.” And because the truth, as Churchill put it, must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies, Pincus provided the administration’s comeback:
Although senior intelligence officials said they are convinced Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, they feel they will not be able to prove it until after an invasion, when U.S. military forces and weapons analysts would have unrestricted access. These officials said the administration is withholding some of the best intelligence on suspected Iraqi weapons—uncertain as it is—from UN weapons inspectors in anticipation of war.
Right, the Bush administration could have pointed out where those weapons were hidden—if they had wanted to. Would you trust a reporter who swallowed this explanation to watch your car?
And here’s what passes for dissenting opinion in what may be the Post‘s single best example of not failing to be properly skeptical of administration WMD claims:
Some officials charge the administration is not interested in helping the inspectors discover weapons because a discovery could bolster supporters in the UN Security Council of continued inspections and undermine the administration’s case for war.
Well if AL GORE believed there were WMDs…! (CC Photo: JD Lasica, socialmedia.biz)
Farhi also has an argument about how reporters were hemmed in by journalistic standards—a version of his colleague David Ignatius‘ line (4/27/04) that “the media were victims of their own professionalism” (Extra!, 11–12/04). Here’s Farhi:
Congress’s unwillingness to stand up to the president was critical…. There were no hearings that could have featured skeptical government experts disputing the official line….
Administration officials hogged media attention with scary, on-the-record statements. On the other side, there were few authoritative sources countering them. Even Al Gore believed that Iraq had WMDs….
Pincus and other reporters found people in the intelligence community who questioned the administration’s case. But those with the most knowledge about classified material were unwilling to be identified publicly. And while anonymous sources are fine for suggesting the presence of smoke, they don’t cinch the case for fire.
You’ll notice the common thread here: a lack of “government experts,” “authoritative sources” (like Al Gore!) or on-the-record secret agents. Journalists wanted to write fair, balanced journalism—but they just couldn’t find enough people in the government who would tell them that the government was lying.
Some of the millions of people who weren’t worth listening to about the Iraq War. (CC Photo: JL McVay)
Meanwhile, there were millions of people marching in the streets, holding vigils, signing petitions, calling and writing their representatives—all in an effort to stop the war. These people had leaders, journalists, experts they relied on—the very people who had been “connecting the dots” left by Farhi’s non-failing media.
Did media give a platform to these folks—who, aside from representing a significant segment of public opinion, had the not-inconsiderable virtue of being right? No, they deliberately turned their back on them. Out of 393 sources who discussed the prospect of war on the ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS evening news shows from January 30 until February 12, 2003, according to a FAIR study (3/18/03), “only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups.”
“If you want to say the press failed, you have to ask, what was the press supposed to do?” the Wall Street Journal‘s Gerald Seib told Farhi. Well, it was supposed to provide the accurate information and the space for public debate that democracy requires. But by the account of Farhi and his sources, corporate media never had any intention of doing either of these things. It’s hard to say that the press failed at something it never tried to do in the first place.
P.S.: Farhi’s piece ran while the Washington Post killed a far more critical piece on Iraq and the media it asked Greg Mitchell to write. Apparently the Post thought his piece didn’t offer many “broader analytical points or insights.” Still, Farhi positions himself as a brave contrarian standing up against media self-flagellation. Whatever gets you through the night.
Don’t ask
Don’t tell
And don’t ever confess
> The Media Didn’t Fail on Iraq; Iraq Just Showed We Have a Failed Media
Don’t think that could be stated better, other than to somehow inject the point that the media did not fail, it was taken down by corporate consolidate from an actual effective part of our society to a sham.
And they’re doing the same thing on Iran now. In many cases, the same exact people too.
Great column! Yes, the press could not do its job, because no one in the government would help. What is your problem with that?
Only a crazy leftist, like former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra O’Connor, would accept your assumption that the press is supposed to operate independent of the government so as to constrain it: “the basic assumption of our political system that the press will often serve as an important restraint on government.” Minneapolis Star & Tribune Co. v. Minnesota Comm’r of Revenue, 460 U.S. 575, 585 (1983).
We are building bridges to nowhere, because we can.
What’s was interesting (and disconcerting) to me was the “demonization” and the “wimpification” of the French, the 2 most recent heads of the IAEA, and obviously anti-Iraq war Americans. No one wants to say “I told you so”, but in this case there was a segment of the public that was aware what was going on. It was a strange time to be an American; maybe war is just that way, but I’m not sure we increased National Security by this action.
The media overlooked (and still do) a major point: Bush ordered the weapons inspectors to leave . Though all over Iraq, the inspectors found no WMD, thus undercuting Bush’s case for war. That point alone would get Bush indicted before an any international criminal court, were the US not too skittish to submit to one’s jurisdiction.
The media have never made the connection betweeen those three events (No WMD? Quit looking! I’m ready to bomb! ) Bush needs to sit where Goering sat, for the international crime of aggessive war.
The media overlooked (and still do) a major point: Bush ordered the weapons inspectors to leave . Though all over Iraq, the inspectors found no WMD, thus undercutting Bush’s case for war. That point alone would get Bush indicted before any international criminal court, were the US not too skittish to submit to one’s jurisdiction.
The media have never made the connection betweeen those three events (No WMD? Quit looking! I’m ready to bomb! ) Bush needs to sit where Goering sat, for the international crime of aggressive war.
Sorry. My techno-stupidity duplicated my comment. Keep the last one. Erase earliest one. I tried to. Johnny Klutz
It’s a misapprehension that the US media’s job is to keep government -or corporations- honest. How can they succeed at that when it’s not what they’re intended to do? They are hacks who make fat checks by presenting the oligarchy’s line and obfuscating any contradictory evidence. They do that job, bamboozling the public, extremely well.
The media can continue to spread falsehoods and beat the drums of war because most people practice willful ignorance.
But those of us who see through US imperialism and its propaganda stand on the right side of history. Unfortunately with inaction about global warming we seem to be headed in the direction of having no history!
Yeah, it’s too bad that Bush wasn’t found to have been getting a blow-job from Brittany Spears back in 2003, because THEN I’m positive that there would’ve been wall-to-wall coverage about the immorality of it all, with all the MSM modalities (print, audio/visual/electronic) climbing over each other to investigate and get the story because “Americans have a right to know!” But, invading yet another foreign country (coincidentally, with a lot of oil… what an unforeseen ‘bonus’!) and bombing/killing thousands (which turned out to be 100’s of thousands, possibly > 1M)… THAT’S not important enough to REALLY dig into.
This whole event was so sickening on so many levels and by numerous players (ie; Bush/Cheney/Neo-Cons obviously, the media, the Democrats, and equally the general public), that we as a country finally and irrevocably forfeited any remotely justifiable belief in our supposed international benevolence and reliance on diplomacy.
It was known, at least by some of us that the whole WMD thing was manufactured. That Saddam’s Iraq had been stripped of all his mass kill weapons before the first invasion. Remember that one? Faked satellite photos of Saddam on the border with Saudi Arabia? Babies being “thrown out of incubators” and such?
Apologizes after the fact are moot testimony to their duplicity and stupidity and how controlled they are by the govt and their corporate allies.
The emotions of fear and vengeance override rational thought and critical thinking. Used throughout the last two millennia in order to get people to kill one another.
We as a nation once again failed to hold our elected and non-elected officials (Bush and the Neocons) resonsible for war crimes.
One of the two worst mistakes by Clinton was the telecommunications act that gave near-total control of the media to (then) six multi-national corporations. Rove learned this lesson from Watergate- only the media could stop them; now, there is no one guarding the vault of truth. They print what they approve. The far right, such as the Heritage Foundation, is now quoted and interviewed with regularity by CNN and MSNBC; they appear on the Sunday morning talk shows, as well. By presenting an “opposing view”, the MSM permits the conversation to be controlled by the right, when right and more right are the only positions.
They brazenly lied about the protests; I know first-hand when my daughter called me from jail in NYC (hid her cell phone in her voluminous hair), where thousands were incarcerated in cells with air conditioning blasting in the middle of winter; she and three other college girls were turned out on the streets at 3a.m., with no phone calls permitted. When I repeatedly called the NYT and WAPO, no one would believe me, nor even check it out; NYT reported a ‘dozen or so’ arrests, and never came clean.
If we don’t reclaim our media, we have had it as a democracy; the right’s BS about ‘the web has many views’ ignores the reality of where most Americans get their news (if any), via MSM.
Here in Ohio, one family owns a TV station, radio, and now, ALL of the print media in Central Ohio (they already own the only daily newspaper- The Columbus Dispatch)- the Wolfes, and all lean hard right. Protests to the takeover with the Feebs at Justice (Anti-trust) went nowhere; they even permitted the Dispatch Companies to buy an ‘underground’ anti-Dispatch “The Other Paper”, which they promptly shut down. This is under Obama folks- we need to push hard on those who supposedly represent us.
Peter Myer: It all started with the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine by the Reagan administration in the 80’s. The FCC removed the language that implemented the Doctrine in 2011 (under Obama).
I notice this article reminds people of failed intel,reporting,and the probability of Bushes war designs.What it does not say is that saddam admitted openly to his interrogators that he played a shell game as to what he did and did not have.He did this he said to keep the world guessing(bad move with Bush after 911)He also said that if left to his own designs that he would of rebuilt any damn weapons system he wanted.He felt his document of surrender was null and void.And that is the big elephant in the room.As Bill Clinton himself said in his book….Iraq had broken all its 16 caveats of its surrender protocol.War will come again with them.It is only a matter of when.After 911 he told Bush and the world that he was back, and they could all take a long run off a short pier.Bad decision……..for all of us.
And Brux where do you want the fairness doctrine?Where do you want government to step into free speech, and challenge we must always see the other side of the coin?Must a black civic pride show be balance by a KLan pride show?Must Bill from mars have half his show be countered by people of faith?Or must the seven hundred club be followed by an atheist show?During the election we actually had one debate(a format where two people are set to speak)where laughing joe Biden never let the other man say a word.No no no.If i want a show that pushed scientology,the government has no right to “produce” my show.My show ..say it a 100 times.Rush can say what he wants…Howard stern can say his bit.Bill from Mars and O’rielly.Sean Hannity….democracy now.Government keep you claws off of free enterprise ,and freedom of speech.When the president goes on the air to attack Republicans I do not want a government body demanding the half his time be used by the other side.Dumbest idea the libs have ever come up with.A government sensory board to control and produce all media towards their idea of fairness.
@ Brux The Fairness Doctrine says that when a company is using OUR FREE PUBLIC AIRWAVES to make billions of dollars, the least they can do is to present us with both sides of important arguments – and that is not Democrats vs. Republicans either!
For example, if the Fairness Doctrine was still in place, we could legally go after the media for giving the same gravitas to the climate scientists’ consensus on Global Warming as to oil company for-hire-scientist-whores’ sell-out theory. We could sue them for equally presenting Creationist nut theory and Darwin’s no-longer-a-Theory.
thank you