Veteran critic of White House turns on 'gullible' press pack
Veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas has turned on her fellow reporters and has accused them of failing in their duties as supposed "watchdogs of democracy" in the run up to the Iraq war."I ask myself every day why the media have become so complacent, complicit and gullible," she said. "It all comes down to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that led to fear among reporters of being considered 'unpatriotic' or 'un-American'."
What was astonishing about the lead up to the Iraq war was the fact that the media took what the White House was telling them at such face value when most of it made no sense.
Even the scant research I had done through search engines had told me that top quality chemical weapons - which no-one was suggesting that Saddam possessed - had a shelf life of five years. Saddam had been under punitive sanctions for twelve years. It seemed to me that anything Saddam did possess was bound to be mush.
However, newspapers in the US and UK - with the notable exception of The Independent - continued to print inflammatory rubbish suggesting that the case the US was making was reasonable, when it quite clearly was not.
Thomas gives us a possible explanation for this and, in doing so, appears to confirm that the days of journalists like Woodward and Bernstein challenging and bringing down a corrupt administration are well behind us:"Reporters have a duty to follow the truth wherever it leads them, regardless of politics. But people do worry about their jobs."
Of course, one should always remember that during this period White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was warning that all Americans "need to watch what they say".
Such atmospheres are never conducive to truth. But then, the truth was the last thing this White House was promoting.
Very few newspapers have taken time to question their failings on this matter. The New York Times was one of the few to do so after it became clear that the source for many of their Judith Miller written front pages was the disgraced Iraqi shyster Ahmed Chalabi, a man who appeared to have told lie upon lie to facilitate a US invasion.
The paper was forced to admit:
"We have found a number of instances of coverage that were not as rigorous as they should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims."At least the New York Times have issued some form of "mea culpa". Fox News and the bastions of the right have continued to print garbage unabated and unashamedly.
And many on the right continue to find ways to justify the lies that led to this war, pretending that the Bush administration believed the information they were pushing, when the Downing Street memo has long ago proven that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" (of invasion).
Historians will marvel that Bush was able to carry all of this out and remain in office.
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2 comments:
"re-examining the claims."
When the NY Times published this pseudo-apology, which was buried by the way, the pipeline of Chalabi bullshit was well known. And it was known then that Miller was the one working the pumphouse. Keller says that Judy operated outside of his control, Miss Run-amok, as though the editor of the NY Times had no way of controlling content and enforcing sourcing standards. What a crock.
What's more scary is that the rest of them have offered no apology at all.
I know NYT had theirs dragged out them. And the idea that the editor never asked her how solid were her sources is a crock.
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