May Day Amnesia
by digby
Real journalist Eric Boehlert is subbing for Eric Alterman this week and reminds us that Codpiece Day represents more than one embarrassing moment strutting across the deck of an aircraft carrier like a Chippendale’s dancer. It was also one year ago today that the Downing Street Memos were published. And, like the speech that shall not be mentioned, it wasn’t covered by the mainstream media.
Boehlert’s new book “Lapdogs” (which I can’t wait to read) apparently discusses this odd moment of journalistic paralysis at some length:
Like a newborn placed in a roomful of bachelors, the Downing Street Memo was greeted with befuddled stares; a hard-to-figure puzzle that was better left for somebody else to solve. And that’s what was so striking —how uniform the MSM response was. Why, in the face of the clearly newsworthy memo did senior editors and producers at virtually every major American news outlets fail to do the most rudimentary reporting —the who, what, where, why, and how of the Downing Street Memo? Instead, journalists looked at the document and instinctively knew it was not a news story. Journalists didn’t simply fail to embrace or investigate the Downing Street Memo story, they actively ignored it.
The document the press didn’t know how to report said this:
SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL – UK EYES ONLY
DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell
IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY
Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.
This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.
John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam’s regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action…
Michael Kinsley is perhaps the most famous pundit to opine as to the worthlessness of that document, but he wasn’t the only one. It simply wasn’t considered newsworthy that we had documentary proof of our leaders’ lies and manipulation leading up to the war. Kinsley said that the report reflected DC conventional wisdom and didn’t really prove the president had decided to go to war. I’ve always thought that was an interesting interpretation. It lends credence to the idea that the insiders all knew that Bush had decided to invade Iraq come hell or high water and yet raised no objections to the president’s outright lies to the nation and the world in which he repeatedly said the opposite. Now why was that?
Kinsley seems to be operating from a position of world-weary cynicism on this one. But for most of the media it was something else entirely:
An American soldier was writhing on the ground, his right hand holding a bloody stump. Screams echoed like shock waves through the hot zone that frigid December morning.
Four nervous reporters rushed to the fallen infantryman, offering frantic words of comfort as they worked to stop the bleeding. John Burnett of National Public Radio was part of the group faced with administering first aid until a medic arrived. He later reported on the exercise on “All Things Considered,” with a background of gunfire and anguished cries.
Fortunately, this was merely a simulated combat wound, part of an unprecedented military boot camp designed by the Pentagon to help journalists prepare to cover modern warfare as a showdown with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein loomed.
Lethal biological agents, brutal urban combat and the noxious fumes of scorched oil fields could become reality for Burnett and hundreds of others on round-the-clock standby for Gulf War II.
[…]
Back home, editors waited and worried over the Pentagon’s final decision on which media outlets would win the embedding game.
Sandy Johnson, the Associated Press’ Washington bureau chief, laid out the best-case scenario: “The big pro would be that you’d get lucky and wind up with a unit that sees real action…that you would be the first Western journalist with the U.S. military” during a march into Baghdad.
The media had wanted the war as much as the administration did. Raising a ruckus about the Downing Street Memo would have been turning the light on themselves, too.
Now a year later, almost to the day, Steven Colbert went before the administration and its enablers in the press corps and skewered them to their faces on their lies and omissions with a scathing satire. And like the Downing Street memos, the press is simply not bothering to report it.
The establishment media supported Bush almost from the moment he announced his intention to run for president, much of it fueled by their frustration that they misjudged the public’s opinion of Clinton. After 9/11, they became part of the administration for quite some time. There were, of course, notable exceptions. But all in all it has been a very ugly chapter in American journalism.
Three years ago today, the media celebrated a cynical staged photo-op as if the president were a super-hero, come to save the world. Two years later they ignored the documents that exposed the administration’s lies and their own complicity. This year they continue to pretend that nobody has noticed, even when they are confronted to their faces.
Perhaps when they find out that the administration has been tapping their phones and reading their emails, they will understand which side their bread is buttered on. Maybe. They do look hot in those safari jackets.
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