Danny Schechter: The Iraq Scandals: Media Failures Are Next

(MediaChannel.org) "By July of 2004, much of what was left of the pretexts and rationalizations for the US invasion of Iraq had unraveled. Public opinion had turned against the war. The press was filled with admissions of "failures."
Richard Clarke, President's Bush's own terrorism coordinator, went public with a view of the war as evidence of a failure of policy. It was, he charged, not only NOT part of the war on terror but undermining it.
Experienced military leaders like General Anthony Zinni and others condemned the war as military failure.
A Senate Committee in the US and a commission headed by Lord Butler in the UK catalogued extensive intelligence failures. The senators condemned what they called "groupthink."
These critics -- including the 9/11 Commission -- remain relatively narrow in their approach by focusing on problems or process and organizational defects. Few look at the larger picture or dare to hold politicians directly accountable. The Butler Commision specifically exonerated Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Critics consider many of these inquiries as part of a cover-up, not signs of serious investigation to expose wrong-doing and, more importantly, its consequences. In intelligence circles, this is called a "limited hang out" -- a technique in which some disclosures are dribbled out to avoid revealing more devastating ones. The effect is an illusion of real candor.
Take The New York Times. On July 16, it admitted in an editorial that "we were wrong about the weapons." But what about the rest of its coverage, which underplayed civilian casualties, missed many of the reasons for the Iraqi resistance, and was behind on the Abu Ghraib torture story? Ditto for The Washington Post whose ombudsman faulted underreporting of demonstrations.
In my soon-to-be-released film WMD, (www.wmdthefilm,com) based on my own study of the coverage of the war, leading anti-war organizer Leslie Cagan says that such underreporting was not the problem: "What there was not decent coverage of was the analysis. What we were trying to say about what was wrong with the war, why we never should've gone to war, why the war needed to end, what was driving--the motor force behind the war. That analysis never got into the mainstream media."
Orville Schell, the head of the Journalism Department at the University of California at Berkeley explained that that's because media outlets "not only failed to seriously investigate administration rationales for war, but little took into account the myriad voices in the on-line, alternative, and world press that sought to do so."
The "groupthink" cited by the Senate was not confined to government agencies. This apt phrase could as easily be applied to the one institution charged with scrutinizing official failures: the media.
To the list of institutional failures, we can now add the powerful U.S. news industry, which gave the war its legitimacy and organized public support for it by a pattern of over-hyped and under-critical reporting in which jingoism was often substituted for journalism.
As US public opinion turns against the war, and world condemnation of the occupation increases, some voices in the media are now being heard as their scandalous complicity finally becomes an issue.
With a few prominent media institutions acknowledging their flawed coverage, others are likely to follow. Despite the essential media support for US foreign policy, and a propensity for news managers to follow the government's lead in setting the agenda, dissent is growing and it is likely that the mea culpas now being seen in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post will grow into a larger chorus before a consensus for action is formed.
Like the Vietnam War, what was once a vocal minority's view will work its way into the mainstream and find broad acceptance.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was the first to identify this process, and wrote that "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident."
The process usually starts with a few individuals whose skepticism is rewarded with recriminations and even dismissal. In the news world, it began with the firing of small town newspaper editors and cartoonists who dared to dissent. Few nationally known newspeople came to their defense.
Popular TV talk show host Phil Donahue came next, purged by MSNBC for his anti-war programming. That network's most heavily promoted correspondent Ashleigh Banflied was "taken to the woodshed" when she questioned MSNBC's coverage at a talk at Kansas State University. The network later dropped her.
Soon, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Peter Arnett was fired for saying on Iraqi TV what he was also saying on American television -- that the US military was underestimating Iraqi resistance. That view, which has now been accepted, was branded then as treason and worse. Arnett was targeted first by Fox News and later made the subject of a campaign by the Free Republic website which flooded NBC executives with demands that he be fired.
Critics of the war were not just ridiculed. They were ignored and marginalized. Former BBC chief Greg Dyke (who was forced to resign because of a scandal involving BBC reporting which was later found to be baseless)said that of 800 experts interviewed on US TV in the run-up to the war and during the US invasion only six challenged the war,. A FAIR study of 1,716 on-air sources cited by TV news in this period found that 71 percent supported the war, while only 3 percent opposed it.
This lack of balance on TV -- the medium that most Americans turn to for their news -- has yet to be acknowledged, explained or apologized for even as some TV journalists reluctantly begin to admit they were wrong. When CNN' s Christianne Amanpour charged that her own network and others were muzzled, no TV correspondents echoed her charge or offered their own experiences. Recently CNN's Wolf Blitzer admitted "we just weren't skeptical enough." To his credit Fox's Bill O'Reilly admitted (not on Fox but on Good Morning America) that he was wrong on WMD's too.
These media failures have opened the door and a mass market for counter-narratives and other media offering alternate and suppressed information. Speaking of Michael Moore's film Fahreheit 911, George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian, said: "The success of his film testifies to the rest of the media's failure." San Francisco Chronicle writer Tim Goodman charged that "Fahrenheit 9/11" is rattling the cages of established journalism.
This is a cage that needs to be rattled. Already Fox is under attack in Robert Greenwald's new film OutFoxed. For the trifecta, watch for WMD.

~News Dissector Danny Schechter writes a daily blog for Mediachannel.org. His new film WMD (wmdthefilm.com) is making the rounds of festivals. His book "Embedded Weapons of Mass Deception" (Prometheus Press) was the first book to examine the media failures in Iraq."