Category: Old Dish

From Newsweek:

Wilson’s report seems to have vanished into the bureaucratic maw. In his January ’03 State of the Union address, President Bush, citing British intelligence reports, repeated the charge that the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium from Niger.

Not true. He said Africa. There’s an important difference. The writers of this story are excellent journalists. If they cannot get this right, what hope for the rest of the crew? The truth is: they have internalized this stuff. They don’t even see their own biases any more. Please keep sending me media mentions of Bush’s citation of Niger in his 2003 SOTU. If we can’t stop them spreading untruths, we can at least monitor them.

Some disturbing details about some of Arnold’s enemies.

Worth watching what the BBC does on its website. It often dramatically alters copy after it’s posted – and not for legitimate reasons, like typos or minor amendments. In an earlier draft of this piece, for example, the following sentence appeared: “Syria is, of course, Israel’s enemy. The two countries are still in an official state of war, caused by Israel’s occupation and illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights.” Now it reads:

Syria is, of course, Israel’s enemy. The two countries have been in a state of war since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The Israelis have long charged that Damascus uses the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah as a proxy army to launch attacks along Israel’s border with Lebanon. And since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising, Israel has increasingly focused on the Palestinian opposition groups hosted by Syria. It accuses the exiled leaderships of planning attacks carried out by their military wings in the occupied territories, and accuses Syria (as well as Iran) of backing them.

An improvement, no? But still no mention of the 1967 or Yom Kippur wars. What you see in the first draft, I think, is what the BBC really believes: that the Jews are responsible for all the ills in the Middle East. But even they feel obliged to respond to public pressure. Which is good news, after all. If we can’t get rid of them, we can at least moderate their extremism. Keep sending me BBC lies and propaganda. Exposure works.

“While the players and their bats had a lot to say about the Cubs 5-1 victory, the fans, their love and positive vibes, deserve at least a bit of credit. Not to mention the array of superstitions. Take Marianne Scott of Tinley Park, for example. In the left field bleachers of Turner Field in Atlanta, she gripped her good luck charm, a hollowed-out baseball that holds her mother’s ashes.” – from the Chicago Tribune.

Hugh Hewitt on the Los Angeles Times and the recall.

Pity she can’t even spell his name right.

“It’s me. I’m still alive.” – the boyfriend at 11.44 am. These Cubs fans are a strange bunch, aren’t they?

“I’m sort of amazed at what was powerful information about both their intent and their actual activities that were not known and were hidden from UN inspectors seems not to have made it to the press. This is information that, had it been available last year, would have been headline news.” – David Kay, Fox News.

From a balanced assessment in the Washington Post today:

The apparent absence of existing weapons stocks, therefore, does not mean Hussein did not pose a WMD threat. In fact, fragments of evidence in Kay’s report about ongoing biological weapons research suggest that Hussein may have had a quick “break-out” capacity to threaten his neighbors and, indeed, the United States with biological agents (possibly including infectious agents).

The author goes on to say that the presence of actual WMDs widely assumed before the war has nevertheless been debunked (at least, so far). What we need is an analysis of why we got wrong what we got wrong. There’s no question that we were led to believe that there were stockpiles of WMDs unaccounted for in Saddam’s Iraq before the war. And we still don’t have a good explanation for that. But this does not mean that the war was not justified in the terms under which it was waged: that Iraq had an obligation to account fully for its WMD program (it didn’t), that it cease all such research and development (it didn’t), that it stop deceiving U.N. inspectors (it didn’t), and, above all, that it posed a threat, via intermediary terrorists, that was intolerable after 9/11 (it did without a shadow of a doubt, as the Kay report shows). Is this kind of nuanced assessment – important for our future intelligence and war-making capacity as well as democratic accountability – possible in today’s polarized culture? We better hope it is.

How’s that for a combo? What they have in common was suggested to me by this very thoughtful and, I’d say, important piece by John Lloyd in the Financial Times over the weekend. Lloyd is writing about how one of the factors leading the BBC into its current state is the general media culture in Britain as a whole, and in particular its approach to politicians:

All of British public life has grown much more harshly questioning over the past two decades. In part this is a reflection of the well-discussed decline in public manners and deference. In his rooms in the Commons, Peter Mandelson – who has been forced twice from cabinet office after media revelations – told me that, “everyone is now treated in the same way: politicians, celebrities, sports people, without discrimination. The standards of manners and courtesy have dropped. Politicians, it seems, are regarded as being for the use of the media, purely and simply, to be used and abused.”

Used and abused. One of the saddest stories of the weekend was Matt Drudge’s photographic display of Maria Shriver in the headlights. Now, Shriver is a hardened journalist herself, but the toll of what now passes for politics had clearly taken their toll. But the ratings are surely up. The most popular – and lucrative – discourse now consists of both sides vying to call each other traitors or liars. This is not to say that the media should be what goo-goo types or Jim Fallows wants. Sharp elbows, wit, excoriations, sarcasm, polemic all have an important place. But big media organizations also have another obligation (which free-loading misanthropes like me can legitimately avoid). Lloyd sums it up well:

Public-service journalism is primarily concerned with one “output”: better informed citizens. In an organisation as rich as the BBC, this could be done by deploying journalists to report on the complexity of the world. The broadcaster could underpin, not seek to replace, democratic politics. It should assume that all power, including political power, can tend to corruption and it should investigate any possible abuses. But it must also do what the British media does not do: recognise that the media has become one of the largest powers in the world, and thus needs investigation itself. In that way lies some hope of trust, even in a cynical world.

The coverage of Iraq mainly as a means to bash Bush and Blair, the hounding of the private life of a pol like Schwarzenegger (or Clinton, for that matter) and the disguised conflation of reporting with opinion are all signs of a media in some kind of crisis. The popularity of blogs is, in some ways, related to this. But we are only a very small part of the solution. A deeper, wider cultural change is needed.