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Subject:
The media is telling us
what the president wants us to hear - and ignoring historic echoes and
basic contradictions.
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The media is telling us what the president wants us
to hear and
ignoring historic echoes and basic contradictions. |
More stories by
Norman Solomon |
Curiosity may occasionally kill a cat. But
lack of curiosity is apt to terminate journalism with extreme prejudice.
"We will not set an artificial timetable for
leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists and make them
believe they can wait us out," President Bush said in his State of the
Union address. "We are in Iraq to achieve a result:
A country that is
democratic, representative of all its
people, at peace with its neighbors and able to defend itself."
President Johnson said the same thing about
the escalating war in Vietnam. His rhetoric was typical on Jan. 12, 1966:
"We fight for the principle
of self-determination that the people of South Vietnam should be able to
choose their own
course, choose it in free elections without violence,
without terror, and without fear."
Anyone who keeps an eye on mainstream news
is up to speed on the latest presidential spin. But the reporters who tell
us what the president
wants us to hear should go beyond stenography to note historic echoes and
point out basic contradictions.
A couple of days before the voting in Iraq,
the lead story on the front page of The New York Times summing up
the
newspaper's exclusive
interview with President Bush had reported his assertion "that he would
withdraw American forces
from Iraq if the new government that is
elected on Sunday asked him to do so, but that he expected Iraq's first
democratically
elected leaders would want the troops to remain."
Logically, the president's statement should
have set off warning buzzers along the lines of "What's wrong with this
picture?"
For instance: Public opinion polls in Iraq are consistently
showing that most Iraqis want U.S. troops to quickly withdraw
from their
country. Yet Bush asserted that the
Iraqi election would be democratic even while he expressed confidence
that the resulting government would defy the desires of most Iraqi people
on the matter of whether American military
forces should remain.
The easy way for journalists to reconcile
this contradiction is to ignore it a routine approach in news reporting.
Military power has a way of creating some
political constituencies for itself. And that is certainly true of the
Pentagon's
massive footprint in Iraq,
where the Jan. 30 voting was part of a mystified process with a
U.S.-selected election
commission and ground rules that kept candidates' political stances, and even their names, mostly secret from the
voters. In
the coming months, the potential for a disconnect between voters and
the policies of the new government's
leaders is enormous.
Since last summer, the leadership of the
"interim" government in Baghdad has been largely comprised of Iraqis
opting
to throw their lot in with
the occupiers. At this point, their hopes for power and perhaps their
lives depend on the
continued large-scale presence of American troops.
Norman Solomon is co-author of Target
Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You.
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