In his speech the other night, the president used the term "full sovereignty" several times as he sought to describe the transition of power in Iraq come the end of June. However, in subsequent paragraphs he went on to say that Iraqi sovereignty, full as it might be, would not include jurisdiction over the troops that occupy the country nor the conduct of foreign nationals working for the occupying force. Now, if that's sovereignty, DeGaulle never would have made his way to London to duke it out with Churchill and Eisenhower while he might have led his fight against Hitler in the pleasant clime of the south of France in Petain's Vichy state.
If you do not control the army that controls your streets, you do not have sovereignty, period! You are at best a transitional entity and at worst, no better than a Quisling or a Petain. So how did the media treat the president's words spoken just the other night? Not so curiously, they pretty much gave him yet another pass. Even when Tony Blair the next day declared that Great Britain would accept having its troops under Iraqi control, there was very little stir in the newsmedia world.
Just the week before, Colin Powell had made something close to a major gaffe while speaking on the same subject to a group of Arab leaders gathered in Jordan. Powell was forced the next day to go back on his earlier statement to get back in line with the sovereignty: now-you-see-it-now-you-don't camp. The flap even played out on Washington's premier insider Sunday morning program, Meet the Press, when Powell appeared to be whisked out of camera range by his press secretary. Still, the media, appeared once again to be nearly brain-dead on the subject.
For the DymaxionWeb central, we monitor the news using a number of automated search engines. It can be quite disturbing to see a perfectly similar story repeated from newspaper to newspaper across the country. Of course, there is such a thing as news syndication through the AP, UPI, etc. but what is most striking is that on stories of major importance, these newspapers have basically decided to leave the reporting to others. And we are not talking about international news here but on the basic economy.
And so it turns out that it is really not only the Jason Blairs of the world that bring discredit on the standard press; they do a pretty good job of it themselves even when they are checking their sources. The New York Times is now, just maybe, sort of doing a much more important mea culpa, in our estimation, than the one they did for Jason, in reacting to questions coming out of the blogging world regarding their coverage of the run-up to the war. To remind those who might have forgotten, both the Washington Post and the New York Times supported the inexorable march to war in Iraq with very little hemming and hawing. But the Times, in all its gray respectability, served to provide the most vociferous cover to the argument by running a string of stories authored and co-authored by Judith Miller. Judith was, after all, something of an expert on scary stuff like nerve gas and bio nightmares not to mention aluminum tubes used for nuclear bombmaking. For pure resonance, her creds had been further enhanced by the weight given her testimony by "independent" programs like PBS's "Frontline".
She had covered the dismantling of Russian WMD programs and built a reputation as a tough, not easily daunted reporter with a deep knowledge base on the subject. And yet, it now turns out that according to her own writing, she mainly sourced her stories through the same defectors that Ahmed Chalabi had supplied to the Pentagon, according to an article written in the Washington Post by Howard Kurtz, the Post's media critic: see article.
Judy, it seems even got into a heated email dispute with John Burns, the gray-bearded Times man through thick and thin in Baghdad, when he questioned internally her commitment to the cause of WMD. Later on, during the postwar search period, Judith's zeal turned out to be no less than that of the elusive Vice President. Perhaps the Times ought to assign Judy to find out where our Scarlet Pimpernel is hiding out these days?
Our point is not to single out Judy or the Times for their role, important in terms of credibility in getting public support for the war.... and as bad as the implications of that are and have been on the lives of so many-- but instead to burnish our own particular point of view on the role of the official media and of its ultimate credibility on things that really matter.
It's been our notion for a long time that the press can't help but act as a cheerleader for Wall Street and the present administration's spin on the economy. Only when there is already blood on the ground do they get themselves worked up like a pack of jackals nosing around the body of a near-dead lion.
There's an object lesson here somewhere and it has to do with what we hope to accomplish at our new central node: www.dymaxionweb.com. We've got some test streams up now and will be working on populating our columns with those of you writing from behind the scenes and in a position to help peel back the veils. Please take a look and get in touch!