ISN’T THE NEWS terrible?
That was the rhetorical question posed by the late British culture critic Raymond Williams in the 1970s. He was referring to the quality of reporting, not the events being reported (though they were often bad, too).
These days there are plenty of people who share Williams’ belief that the MSM (that’s “mainstream media” to the unhip) are pretty rotten. But the most common—and certainly the loudest—media bashers among us are the intellectual descendants not of Williams but of another revered culture critic of the ’70s: Spiro Agnew.
Like all great minds, Agnew was misunderstood by many of his contemporaries. A lot of highbrow types made fun of him for branding the media “nattering nabobs of negativity.”
Granted, this wasn’t the kind of phrase that would ever have cachet on university campuses and in coffeehouses, but it expressed the attitude of much of “middle America”—which is code for “conservative white people,” or sometimes “angry and resentful conservative white people.”
Today these folks—let’s call them neo-Agnewites —are ascendant in our culture, and they’re continuing the crusade of the late, great vice president and his boss, Tricky Dick Nixon, who once growled to his staff: “Remember, the press is the enemy.”
When Newsweek screwed up its coverage of alleged Quran desecrations by U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, the neo-Agnewites pounced, condemning the article as yet another example of the “liberal” media’s eagerness to distort reality to make America and the Bush administration look bad.
The White House itself had a go at Newsweek. “The report has had serious consequences,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. “People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged.”
Now, there’s nothing wrong with slamming sloppy journalism. But sober minds have to admit that the recent outpouring of anger among Muslims didn’t occur just because of one magazine article.
The Newsweek piece may have stoked the coals of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, but why were those coals already so hot? Could it be because the United States had done numerous other things to alienate and enrage many Muslims?
Let’s also bear in mind that no article can be blamed for shooting protesters— in this case, the cops in Afghanistan get credit for that.
And then let’s acknowledge that the Newsweek article was not the first and only report of U.S. interrogators desecrating the Quran—there have been several others by U.S. and British news outlets and by groups such as the International Committee of the Red Cross. So American interrogators may indeed be defiling Qurans and resorting to other forms of religious humiliation.
Still, we can all surely agree with McClellan that it’s wrong to cause unnecessary loss of life and lamentable when our nation’s image is sullied.
That’s why all honest media critics, not to mention all patriots, must demand that America’s MSM work harder to find out whether the Bush administration deliberately misused intelligence to build support for the invasion of Iraq.
This illegal military action, after all, has caused the unnecessary deaths of over 1,600 U.S. troops and possibly over 100,000 Iraqis, and has done more to harm America’s standing overseas than anything since the Vietnam War.
And, to date, there's been no official probe into how the White House used the prewar intelligence on Iraq.
Why bring this up again? Because on May 1, The Sunday Times of London revealed the contents of a secret Downing Street memo that indicated the Bush administration had decided to go to war by the summer of 2002 and was determined to massage the intelligence to make its case.
The memo, which contained the minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his top security advisers, discussed a visit to Washington by the head of Britain’s intelligence service.
“Military action was now seen as inevitable,” the memo stated. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.”
The real attention-grabber followed: “[T]he intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” You don’t say.
The Sunday Times report compelled 90 members of Congress to sign a letter to President Bush requesting answers to the “troubling revelations.”
I bet a lot of you haven’t heard about any of this. That’s strange, though, because you’d think that if the neo-Agnewites were right about the MSM on this side of the Atlantic, the Washington press corps would be hounding the White House for answers to the questions raised by this presumably authentic memo.
Well, think again. America’s MSM has shown little interest in the memo and its implications. (The Free Lance–Star is one of the only newspapers in the country to have put the story on the front page. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I had a hand in this.)
Incredibly, The Washington Post didn’t get around to reporting on the memo until May 13—and even then it buried the story on Page A18. The Post’s ombudsman asked the paper’s editors why the story was ignored for so long and was told that “it was a story that, in the best of all worlds, would have been in the paper, but we were tied up with [British] election coverage.”
Of course, this oversight (if that’s what it is) should surprise no one. It fits into a well-documented pattern of shoddy coverage by America’s elite media of the runup to the Iraq invasion.
If there’s an upside to all this, it’s that the neo-Agnewites now have a chance to show their true colors. If they’re for transparency and truth—preconditions for a healthy democracy—they will demand that the American MSM pick up on this story and “move the needle,” as we say in the business, beyond what the British media have already done.
In addition, they’ll back the members of Congress who are calling on the White House to respond to what’s been disclosed so far by the Brits.
On the other hand, if the neo-Agnewites are merely foot soldiers in the struggle to quash scrutiny of the right wing’s agenda, they will remain silent about the recent Iraq revelations.
I have a feeling I know which path most of the neo-Agnewites will choose, and it disheartens me. Because, honestly, if the left and right came together to demand real answers and accountability from our leaders, would that be so terrible?
RICK MERCIER is a writer and news editor for The Free Lance–Star.