Remember WaPo told us the case for war was literally “Irrefutable?” I do, even if you can no longer find its warmongering op-ed piece from 2003 in the Post’s archives:
AFTER SECRETARY OF STATE Colin L. Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Powell left no room to argue seriously that Iraq has accepted the Security Council’s offer of a “final opportunity” to disarm. And he offered a powerful new case that Saddam Hussein’s regime is cooperating with a branch of the al Qaeda organization that is trying to acquire chemical weapons and stage attacks in Europe. Mr. Powell’s evidence, including satellite photographs, audio recordings and reports from detainees and other informants, was overwhelming. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, called it “powerful and irrefutable.”
Yeah, that was our beloved Joe Biden, doing his sniveling best not to stand in the way of the coming train wreck kniown as the Iraq War. Not his best moment, though he was obviously far from the only political figure, right, center, or left, to voice support for a war to stop the imminent threat of Saddam’s mushroom clouds. And the Washington Post hasn’t changed much since 2003. They are still trying to cover their ass for being the propaganda wing for Cheney’s Fourth Branch of government. WaPo asked Greg Mitchell to write a piece on the Iraq war, but then decided not to run it because he blamed the media for becoming the Bush administration’s de facto propaganda ministry. I guess our media elites really can’t handle (much less report) the truth.
I’m publishing below the assigned Outlook piece that I submitted to the Washington Post on Thursday. I see that the Post is now defending killing the piece because it didn’t offer sufficient “broader analytical points or insights.” I’ll let you decide if that’s true and why they might have rejected it.
The original appeared almost word-for-word at The Nation this weekend (there I added a reference to Bob Woodward and to Bob Simon). I had absolutely no plans to even mention that the piece was killed until late last night when I saw that Paul Farhi of the Post had written for Outlook a piece claiming that the media “didn’t fail” in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Maybe this had something to do with the Post’s decision not to run Mitchell’s analysis of our media’s collaboration with Cheney and the plethora of neocons in the Bush administration who lied us into the most costly war in our history:
THE MINI-CULPA This phrase was coined by Jack Shafer of Slate after The New York Times published an “editors’ note” in May 2004, admitting it had publishing a few “problematic articles” (it didn’t mention any authors) on Iraqi WMDs, but pointing out it was “taken in” like most in the Bush administration. Unlike the Times, Washington Post editors three months later did not produce their own explanation but allowed chief media reporter Howard Kurtz to write a lengthy critique. Editors and reporters admitted they had often performed poorly but offered one excuse after another, with phrases such as “always easy in hindsight,” “editing difficulties,” “communication problems” and “there is limited space on Page 1.” One top reporter said, “We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power. “
Mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power (well, any Republican administration)? That’s how the Post’s reporters saw their job at a time when everyone in the Bush administration was demanding our nation go to war – the most momentous act that any government can take, and the most dangerous – a war they insisted was necessary based on ginned up intelligence, half-truths, scary rhetoric and outright lies: as a mouthpiece for Bush and his merry band of warmongers. God forbid they should have acted as independent journalists.
And on that note, I have nothing further to say, for what could be more damning than the Post’s own actions and statements?
Time to move on – to Iran!
Why do people try to scrub embarrassing shit from the internet? It only serves to bolster the case for their guilt when we can prove that they they tried to cover it up. It’s consciousness of guilt.
My guess is that the WaPo calculated that the only people who will get their colons all twisted up in knots are a few dumb fucking hippie liberal bloggers. Unfortunately, it seems they are probably correct. After all, their credibility within their media universe doesn’t seem to be something they are overly concerned about. And they are ensconced comfortably within the cocoon of denial with all the rest of the guilty parties within the national media. They don’t have to fear any judgment from their media cohorts, because almost all of them have same blood on their hands. So there is safety in numbers for the Washington Post.
They don’t have to be concerned about their credibility within the media universe because there is no one to hold them accountable. And clearly they feel no remorse. I love when they say things like “everyone thought there were WMD”. No, everyone did not think that. The Financial Times published numerous stories to the contrary as did Knight Ridder and many others.
“My guess is that the WaPo calculated that the only people who will get their colons all twisted up in knots are a few dumb fucking hippie liberal bloggers. Unfortunately, it seems they are probably correct.”
I don’t think they are correct. What I do think is that they just don’t care. This not caring has actually had very serious consequences for them (loss of respect, and readership) but apparently they don’t care about that either.
If you look a little deeper, it’s not even that they don’t care. It’s that they must pretend to everyone, including themselves, that they don’t care. They know they suck, but they will attribute it to everything but the real reasons. In other words, they are in denial.
ha-ha, not exactly Joe B’s finest quote, eh?
I suppose it is a bit much to expect the corporate media to admit that they simply became the propaganda ministry for Cheney’s War to Liberate Iraq’s Oil.
But as Booman has been documenting, the fact that they are allowing and enabling monsters like Repub Rogers to basically pull the exact same shit with Syria shows that the game is permanently rigged. A great story to follow.
If the executive branch WANTED to send ground troops or flyboyz to topple Assad, the media stampede would be precisely as it was with Iraq—every WH pro-war rationale bleated 24/7, unchallenged. That WaPo acknowledges that it sees itself as “inevitably the mouthpiece” of every admin (and apparently has no power to resist) is amazing, and a sign of just how deeply the country has degenerated.
Our national press now thinks it can’t do much more than be the “mouthpiece” of every executive. Nixon tapes, anyone? Watergate? Pentagon Papers? Those days are long gone–the days of a functioning democracy and government.
I didn’t see a link to the Greg Mitchell piece (apologies if it was there). Here it is:
http://leaksource.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/washington-post-kills-greg-mitchells-piece-on-media-failu
res-re-iraq/
See “cover your ass” in paragraph after the first excerpt.
There must be oil. Under a rock.
Why we should not take the NEWS media too seriously even when they purport to be giving us the unbiased, unvarnished NEWS.
Grain of salt? Maybe a pound box?
With all due respect, what lamestream media does in regard to actually reporting what “our” government is up to is more or less hopelessly moot.
but if you want to go there, the more damning story is Cheney spoon feeding Iraq “facts” to reporter Judith Miller at the NY Times.. who wrote a piece that was immediately referred to by Cheney, and other jagoffs as proof (!!!!) Iraq had WMD’s.
This is all academic at this point.
The actual problem here is CONGRESS. the pathetic fact that Biden, HRC, and more than a few “democrats” in congress eagerly jumped on the war-mongering, war-profiteering bandwagon and voted in favor of ALL of the recent AUMF’s.. not just the absurd one related to the attack and occupation of Iraq.
and they will do so again, ad nauseum. let’s just face it, for once
Iran is next.
FAIL