13 July 2004 Blog Home : July 2004 : Permalink
Firstly there is this Orson Scott Card piece in the WSJ comparing the Fox with the rest of the US mainstream media. I think he overstates his case a bit but he has a bunch of good examples of how the media fails to be as impartial as it might be. And its not an historical curiousity, Rich Galen does an excellent job of showing how Sunday's Washington Post was well skewed in the anti-Bush/pro-Kerry direction and you can read the articles yourself since they are all online and linked to in the appendix .
We have seen in recent days lots of comment about how "Groupthink" affected the CIA and other intelligence agencies so that they believed that the Iraqi regime had more WMD capability than it really did (note that it did not have zero capability just not as much as was believed), but there has been as bad groupthink in the opposite direction too by the generally Bush-hating media. For example the "yellowcake" story which was trumpeted as evidence that Bush lied now turns out to be rather more complex and in fact to be more like the opposite. Bush told the truth - Iraq did buy or attempt to buy yellowcake from Niger and Joseph Wilson who claimed otherwise was lying through his teeth and knew he was. Then there is the "plastic" turkey story which gets trotted out all over the place - the NY Times has finally admitted that the story is false with this correction
An article last Sunday about surprises in politics referred incorrectly to the turkey carried by President Bush during his unannounced visit to American troops in Baghdad over Thanksgiving. It was real, not fake.
and so on. Indeed the Bush Destruction of Military Records flap that resrufaced recently is another example where the NY Times has to admit that this is not new news - Michelle Malkin has the story with this correction
An article yesterday about the destruction of some payroll records of National Guard members, including President Bush, misstated the record of White House acknowledgment of the loss. The White House indeed took note of the missing information last February when it released hundreds of pages of Mr. Bush's military files. In a briefing paper for reporters on Feb. 10, summarizing those files, it noted that payroll records for the third quarter of 1972 had been lost when they were transferred to microfiche.
The problem of course is that the original vitriol gets splashed on page 1 while the correction gets hidden away on page 32 so unless you read the whole paper or are willing to do some research you still believe the original story.
The media has spent the last year trying to show that Saddam Hussein did not have WMD and was no threat to the USA. They have claimed that Iraq had no links with Al Qaeda, that Iraq had no WMD and that Iraq was making no attempt to gain any of them. Various sources within the US Government who have been prepared to agree with these positions publicly have had top billing to spread their story even though in many cases subsequent investigation of their claims shows that they are either twisting statements misleadingly, suppressing inconvenient facts or in a few cases outright lying. The corrections that occur when the sources and the media are called on their errors tend to involve a swift moving of goalposts to claim that the evidence provided is still not sufficient
This fairly long analysis of the recent senate intelligence report - with links to the PDF file so you can read it - is pretty clear about one thing. The CIA may have had duff intelligence but they did not bow to political pressure and their intelligence and its analysis did indicate precisely what Bush, Powell, Cheney etc. said in the period leading up to the war, but you wouldn't realise it if you read the newspapers:
To go back to the bias question. This report is in its way a good example of how bias and editorializing should be avoided in a straight news item. The report also has a link to this article which is a politically charged opinion piece and which makes no attempt at being non-partisan. This opinion piece is essentially based upon the research in the article I have linked to first and the contrast is IMO educational. Not because they disagree but because the first document is just an analysis/précis of the senate report whereas the second builds on the précis to name names, theorise connections and so on. The problem with the "liberal" media is that they seem to have forgotten the difference between reporting and editorializing and they shove in opinions and conjectures in apparently straight-news reports without making it clear where the reporting ends and the opinion bits begin.