> Doug Pensinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > also check out: It's a Circular Firing Squad of > Flying Attack Monkeys! > [http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000525.html] > > or http://tinyurl.com/yvuq6
Early in the comments section, there is one titled "THROWING BACK THE BUSH-T!" by Daniel E. Teodoru; I found his particularly interesting since he compared what is going on WRT Clarke and the admin's various conflicting denials to drug advertising and actual disease...naturally I would, huh? "I can think of no one in Wash. DC who would consider Richard Clark anything but an honorable man with no personal ambition other than to serve his nation. Yet, after his "60 Minutes" appearance in advance of his book's release today, the Bush White House has mobilized all sorts of staff from Rice at the top on NBC's "Today" show to Bartlett, the PR guy, on Fox-TV, attacking Clark about the way TV adds for prescription drugs attack the symptoms from diseases. It all seems to be based on the viewer's ignorance about both the pathology of the disease and the pharmacology of the treatment. Consequently, the ads resort to "passion plays" such as the woman who suffered severe arthritis but thanks to *prescription only* drug X was able to attend her daughter's wedding and dance all night; now her daughter too has arthritis but "thank goodness that she won't have to suffer as I did," because she has been put on this same drug early in life. They tell you to "talk to your doctor and ask if you are not a candidate for drug X." "What in God's name are you to say? A doctor has five minutes for each patient thanks to HMO standards and is not about to discuss TV Rx with patients... "...I lived through the Cold War-- three shooting wars in it-- and have never heard so much flim-flam absurdity from the national leadership. On the other hand, never in all my years of being "exceptionally well informed" did I ever see a time when a bungling administration lied so much while living in so much of a glass house. The press seems to know so much about the Bush medicine that it can successfully predict the side-effects..." On the press and pre-Gulf War II: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16922 [This is a rather long article; among others, NYT reporter Judith Miller and her contact with various Iraqi defectors/exiles is discussed, esp WRT the "mushroom cloud" scenario.] "...This points to a larger problem. In the period before the war, US journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the administration. Those with dissenting views�and there were more than a few�were shut out. Reflecting this, the coverage was highly deferential to the White House. This was especially apparent on the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction� the heart of the President's case for war. Despite abundant evidence of the administration's brazen misuse of intelligence in this matter, the press repeatedly let officials get away with it. As journalists rush to chronicle the administration's failings on Iraq, they should pay some attention to their own..." "...Yet Albright, having talked with a large number of those experts and scientists, knew that many did not support the CIA assessment. "Understanding the purpose of these tubes was very difficult," he told me. "But hearing there's a debate in the government was knowable by a journalist. That's what I asked Judy to do�to alert people that there's a debate, that there are competent people who disagreed with what the CIA was saying. I thought for sure she'd quote me or some people in the government who didn't agree. It just wasn't there. "The Times," he added, "made a decision to ice out the critics and insult them on top of it. People were bitter about that article�it says that the best scientists are with [the administration]." Miller rejects this. The article, she says, clearly stated that there was a debate about the tubes. As written, however, the piece gives far more attention and credence to officials who dismissed the dissenters, and the debate, as inconsequential�a "footnote." "Frustrated, Albright began preparing his own report about the tubes... "...The unit referred to here was the Office of Special Plans, the same group Seymour Hersh would write about after the war. As such reports show, its existence was widely known before the war. With many analysts prepared to discuss the competing claims over the intelligence on Iraq, the press was in a good position to educate the public on the administration's justifications for war. Yet for the most part, it never did so. A survey of the coverage in November, December, and January reveals relatively few articles about the debate inside the intelligence community. Those articles that did run tended to appear on the inside pages. Most investigative energy was directed at stories that supported, rather than challenged, the administration's case... "...And why, he might have added, didn't the Post and other papers devote more time to pursuing the claims about the administration's manipulation of intelligence? Part of the explanation, no doubt, rests with the Bush administration's skill at controlling the flow of news. "Their management of information is far greater than that of any administration I've seen," Knight Ridder's John Walcott observed. "They've made it extremely difficult to do this kind of [investigative] work." That management could take both positive forms�rewarding sympathetic reporters with leaks, background interviews, and seats on official flights�and negative ones� freezing out reporters who didn't play along. In a city where access is all, few wanted to risk losing it... "...Such sanctions were reinforced by the national political climate. With a popular president promoting war, Democrats in Congress were reluctant to criticize him. This deprived reporters of opposition voices to quote, and of hearings to cover. Many readers, meanwhile, were intolerant of articles critical of the President. Whenever The Washington Post ran such pieces, reporter Dana Priest recalls, "We got tons of hate mail and threats, calling our patriotism into question." Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and The Weekly Standard, among others, all stood ready to pounce on journalists who strayed, branding them liberals or traitors�labels that could permanently damage a career. Gradually, journalists began to muzzle themselves... "..."We were constantly frustrated," Melissa Fleming, an IAEA spokesperson, told me. "The whole focus was on UNMOVIC, which was in New York." According to IAEA staff members, the press gave far too much weight to what US experts or administration officials said. Jacques Baute, the head of the IAEA's Iraq inspection team, complained that the agency had a hard time getting its story out. And that story, he explained, was that by 1998 "it was pretty clear we had neutralized Iraq's nuclear program. There was unanimity on that... "....Asked about this, Miller said that as an investigative reporter in the intelligence area, "my job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." Many journalists would disagree with this; instead, they would consider offering an independent evaluation of official claims one of their chief responsibilities... "...The contrast between the press's feistiness since the end of the war and its meekness before it highlights one of the most entrenched and disturbing features of American journalism: its pack mentality. Editors and reporters don't like to diverge too sharply from what everyone else is writing. When a president is popular and a consensus prevails, journalists shrink from challenging him. Even now, papers like the Times and the Post seem loath to give prominent play to stories that make the administration look too bad. Thus, stories about the increasing numbers of dead and wounded in Iraq �both American and Iraqi�are usually consigned to page 10 or 12, where they won't cause readers too much discomfort." I hope that journalists regain their bulldog hunting of real stories, and lay off the tripe of Michael Jackson and Brittany Spears. As a free people, we depend upon their doggedness in sniffing out what lies behind the pretty fence, and not accepting whatever treats are handed out to them as reward -- or distraction. If the press turns boot-licker, we ordinary people will have no way of knowing what is really going on. and then we will cease to be free. Debbi If I Want Fluff, I'll Get A Poodle, Thanks...Maru __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. 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