How journalists sold America on a war of choice-- and still failed to appease the right

Had enough of the media's self-righteous dismissal of Stephen Colbert's satirical monologue last weekend? I certainly have. Of course, a huge number of news outlets have good reason to present themselves as above that sort of thing, and not about to acknowledge to the pernicious claims of a few kooks-- as this Salon piece points out, they've spent the last few years doing just that. And it doesn't help their image much.

Boehlert's account of the many, many ways in which the corporate media was complicit in selling the public on the invasion of Iraq is exhaustive, and in many ways a frustrating read. Especially, in light of this week's events, given the fawning press response to Bush's famous "Nope, no weapons here!" video a few years ago. Yep, those bereaved parents must've busted a gut at the comedic stylings of the funnyman-in-chief.

But I'll highlight just one example of the shocking ways in which the media helped this administration invade another country on a whim. (It's a very long excerpt, but it's a very long article and highly recommended reading. I'm sure all of us have forgotten at least one of the many 'terror alerts' that turned out to be nothing more than White House fabrications.)

The White House alone controlled virtually all the information about the war on terrorism and it alone decided how that information was disseminated. The press, anxious for access, eagerly played along. That snug relationship was on stark display on January 17, 2002, just weeks before Bush's State of the Union Address. That's when Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller held a hurried press conference, carried live on CNN, to unveil five videotapes found in the rubble of a home near Kabul, Afghanistan, owned by Muhammad Atef, a top aide of bin Laden's. Five men seen on the tapes were identified as deadly terrorists, who, in the words of Ashcroft, "may be trained and prepared to commit future suicide terrorist attacks."

What made the discovery so unsettling, Ashcroft said, was the fact that "the videotapes depict young men delivering what appear to be martyrdom messages from suicide terrorists." The nation's top crime fighter added that the seriousness of the threat demanded the information be released immediately. The names and pictures of the five al-Qaida members were distributed to the press as a sort of worldwide version of the TV show "America's Most Wanted," as Ashcroft asked for tips from concerned world citizens in helping track the men down.

The press eagerly complied. The New York Times played the story on page 1, where it also ran color head shots of the men. The Washington Post also printed the story on its front page, reporting excitedly that "five al-Qaida members ... may be on the loose and planning suicide attacks against Western targets." (Then again, they "may" not.) Meanwhile, CNN reported extensively about the "extraordinary videotape." In fact, there wasn't a television news operation in the country that didn't display the government's most-wanted poster of the five al-Qaida members. It was the best War on Terror prop producers had had in weeks.

Naturally it's newsworthy when government officials lay out those sorts of terror warnings, and nobody's suggesting they should be ignored. But it's also the press's job to seek context and perspective, and pry additional information from officials to determine just how dire the threats might be. Because there was something odd about Ashcroft's breathless news bulletin. For instance, pressed further at the press conference, Ashcroft seemed to back away from his original, already tentative description of the taped utterances, suggesting, "We believe that these could be, and likely appear to be, sort of, martyrdom messages from suicide terrorists." Sort of? Either the statements were martyrdom messages or they were not. Even the overworked Arabic translators inside the government should have been able to make that simple distinction.

Meanwhile, what exactly did the men say on the tapes? Journalists were never told, because before being shown snippets of the tapes, the government stripped all the sound off and refused to provide a printed transcript. Reporters instead were reduced to describing the men's silent gesticulations in an effort to wring out any meaning. There was even less to the story than that. Ashcroft and Mueller did not know, or would not say, if the men planned any imminent attacks, when the tapes were made, when the tapes were found, who found the tapes, what the nationalities of the five men were, if they were in America, or even if they were dead or alive.

No matter. The tapes were universally treated as very big news. Two weeks later, though, in a brief, 235-word aside, the Washington Post revealed intelligence officials had determined the martyrdom tapes had actually been made more than two years earlier, raising doubts about the fear of "imminent" suicide attacks. Would the Post or the New York Times have originally played that story on Page One if Ashcroft had forthrightly announced the so-called suicide tapes had been made in 1999? Probably not. But that's how the War on Terror press game was played; Ashcroft garnered huge headlines with frightening allegations about terrorist threats, and then when the stories petered out the MSM obediently looked away.

Sure, the publication of this excerpt from Boehlert's book 'Lapdogs' might be timed to coincide with the Colbert dust-up, but the initial failures and continuing dishonesty of the press over the genesis of the Iraq war are a blight on American journalism that, as Boehlert points out, should be pored over in journalism schools for years to come.

What remains to be seen is whether or not America's proud political journalists and editors will learn anything from the events of the last few years. Printing bogus stories certainly doesn't burnish one's image. But now they've had their own 'Mission Accomplished' moment. After years of pandering to right-wing critics by abandoning the foundations of journalism in favor of dutifully peddling nonsense and lies, they haven't put those reactionary critics to rest. They just face new right-wing demands that they report on freshly-painted schools instead of the mounting death toll.