How’s this for a quick round-up of untruths: Time (for whom I write a column); the Christian Science Monitor; CNN; the Associated Press; and the Financial Times. I should tip my hat to lefty-blogger, Bob Somerby, for pioneering this point in a far more precarous spot than I am. (But we agreed about Gary Condit as well, way back when.) Somerby gets to the pint quickly enough:
As everyone on earth surely knows, Bush didn’t say, in his SOTU, “that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger.” He referred to alleged attempts to buy uranium from “Africa,” of which Niger is one tiny part. What was the context for Bush’s remark? The October 2002 NIE referred to attempts in Congo and Somalia as well as Niger, and when the Brits released their intel in September 2002-the intel to which Bush’s speech explicitly referred-the British press focussed on Congo, not Niger. Meanwhile, Wilson only said that a sale couldn’t likely be completed in Niger (due to extensive oversight). He didn’t prove that Saddam had never tried to make such a purchase. In short, Wilson’s report, on its face, does not shoot down what Bush said in his speech.
The point is: the media has in fact made this untruth true by constant repetition. And they have done this in an effort to show that Bush was being untruthful. That’s projection, not journalism.
The Dish 