Controversial Cover Angers Roaches, Old People p.1 - The Beast

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6 The BEAST, January 26-February 9, 2005
RIPPED FROM
THE HEADLINES
WMDs not Found, Media Coverage Likewise
The world little noted, but at some point
late last year the American search for
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ended.
We will, however, long remember the
doomsday warnings from the Bush administration
about mushroom clouds and sinister
aluminum tubes; the breathless
reports from TV correspondents when the
invasion began, speculating on when the
‘smoking gun’ would be unearthed; our
own failures to deconstruct all the spin
and faulty intelligence.
—New York Times editorial, Jan. 13
The timorous admission made by
the White House last week that it had
given up pretending to search for
WMDs in Iraq was an occasion for
much smugness and finger-pointing in
most of the major dailies.
Among the rest of the population,
this laughably tiny news item—I’m
writing this column on Jan. 13, but
by the time this hits the newsstands
on the 26th, it will surely, and
amazingly, have been a dead story
for days—was mainly fodder for
two minutes of office water-cooler
gloating among the anti-Bush
crowd.
It is unrealistic to expect anything
different. In the run-up to the war,
every major daily and television
network in the country parroted
the White House’s asinine WMD
claims for months on end, all but
throwing their panties on stage
the instant Colin Powell showed
what appeared to be a grainy aerial
picture of a pick-up truck to the
U.N. Security Council.
“““
Justice would seem to demand
that a roughly equivalent amount
of coverage be given to the truth,
now that we know it (and we can
officially call it the truth now, because even
Bush admits it; previously the truth was just
a gigantic, unendorsed pile of plainly obvious
evidence). But that isn’t the way things
work in America. We only cover things
around the clock every day for four or five
straight months when it’s fun.
O.J. was fun. Monica Lewinsky was fun.
“America’s New War” was fun—there was a
war at the end of that rainbow. But “We All
Totally Fucked Up” is not fun. You can’t
make a whole new set of tv graphics for “We
All Totally Fucked Up.” There is no obvious
location where Wolf Blitzer can do a
somber, grimacing “We All Totally Fucked
Up” live shot (above an “Operation We All
Totally Fucked Up” bug in the corner of the
screen). Hundreds of reporters cannot rush
to stores to buy special khakis or rain slickers
or Kevlar vests in preparation for “We
All Totally Fucked Up.” They would have to
wear their own clothes and stand, not in
front of burning tanks or smashed Indonesian
hovels, but in front of their own apartments.
That is why we will never get four months of
the truth, to match four months of preposterous
bullshit. The business is not designed
for it. It just can’t happen.
Most Americans instinctively understand
this and accept it. Even those people who
are consciously offended by this set of circumstances
accept it. It is as natural to us as
the weather.
However, there are times when this phenomenon
seems to go a little too far. This is
one of those times.
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bbee ffuunnnniieerr tthhaann tthhee ssiigghhtt ooff tthhee New
York Times ccaalllliinngg aa ssttoorryy ““lliittttllee nnootteedd,,””
wwhheenn tthhee ppaappeerr iittsseellff oonnllyy ggaavvee tthhee
ssttoorryy 33..55 iinncchheess oonn Page A16!! LLiikkee
aallmmoosstt aallll tthhee rreesstt ooff tthhee ppaappeerrss iinn tthhee
ccoouunnttrryy,, wwhhaatt tthhee Times mmeeaanntt wwaass nnoott
““lliittttllee nnootteedd,,”” bbuutt little covered..
“““
Countless news organizations last week took
the same pathetic, transparently disingenuous
position vis a vis the WMD flap that the
New York Times did in the above passage.
The basic media lie—the new lie, not the old
lie—was a two-pronged thing. It went something
like this:
First, Bush admitted there were no WMDs,
but so few people cared that it was “little
noted” around the world. Phrases such as
“quiet conclusion” (CBS News) or “quietly
ended” (USA Today) or “quiet denouement”
(the Virginia Pilot) reinforced this idea that
the story was somehow inherently quiet and
of small import.
Descriptions of the story’s small stature
were usually followed by a similarly quiet
mea culpa. They usually read something
like this: Now that we know the truth for
sure, we media organizations must try to
unravel how it “could have happened”—how
we failed to see through it all, or “deconstruct
all the faulty spin and intelligence,” as
the Times put it.
Regarding the first point, what could be funnier
than the sight of the New York Times
calling a story “little noted,” when the paper
bbyy MMaatttt TTaaiibbbbii
itself only gave the story 3.5 inches on Page
A16! Like almost all the rest of the papers in
the country, what the Times meant was not
“little noted,” but little covered. Amazingly,
only two major dailies in the entire country—the
Washington Post and the Dallas
Morning News—even put the official end to
the WMD search on the front page. The rest
of the country’s news organs buried the
story deep in the bowels of their news sections,
far behind Prince Harry’s Nazi suit
and the residual tsunami stuff. And then
they have the balls to turn around and
say this news was “quiet”?
As for the second question—
how it could have happened—I
have an answer. It is an answer
that will not require the convening
of a special symposium at the
Columbia Journalism School, the
commission of a new study by the
Brookings Institution, or a poll by
Poynter. The answer is this: You
lied!
It’s really as simple as that. Everyone
knew it was bullshit. I defy Bill
Keller to stare me in the face and tell
me he didn’t know the whole Iraq war
business was a lie from the start.
Whether or not there were actually
WMDs in Iraq is a canard; this was
essentially unknowable at the time. It
was the rest of it that was obviously idiotic,
yet even the pointiest heads in the
business, like the folks at the Times,
swallowed it with a smile.
There was the idea that Saddam Hussein,
a secular dictator whose chief
domestic enemies were Islamic fundamentalists,
was somehow a natural
potential ally for bin Laden. There was
the supposition, credulously reported for
months, that if Saddam “disarmed,” we
would back off (we were going in anyway,
everyone could see that; all of the
“inspections” coverage, that whole
drama, was a pathetic fraud). There was the
idea that Bush and Co. were sincerely
moved to grave concern by “intelligence”
about Saddam’s weapons (on the contrary,
there was a veritable mountain of evidence
that the Bush administration was turning
over every couch pillow in Washington in
search of even the flimsiest fig-leaf to stick
on its WMD claims; the source of the WMD
panic was clearly the White House, not Langley
or any other place). There was the idea
that a preemptive invasion was not a revolutionary
idea, not illegal, not an outrage. And
so on.
The problem wasn’t a small, isolated ethical
error, like Judith Miller’s Chalabi reporting.
The error here was not a mistake of fact. The
problem was that a central tenet of our system
of news reporting dictates that lies of
consensus will never be considered punishable
mistakes. In other words, once everyone
jumps in the water, a story acquires its
own legitimacy.
And now we get papers like the Times wondering
aloud why they didn’t feel the ground
under their feet. Answer: you jumped in the
water. And you knew what you were doing.