Bush Lies, Media
Swallows
By Eric
Alterman
The Nation
11-7-2
- The more things change... Roughly ten years ago, I
celebrated the criminal indictment of Elliott Abrams for lying to
Congress by writing an Op-Ed in the New York Times on the increasing
acceptance of official deception. (I was just starting my dissertation
on the topic back then.) The piece got bogged down, however, when an
editor refused to allow me even to imply that then-President Bush was
also lying to the country. I noted that such reticence made the entire
exercise feel a bit absurd. He did not dispute this point but explained
that Times policy simply would not allow it. I asked for a compromise. I
was offered the following: "Either take it out and a million people will
read you tomorrow, or leave it in and send it around to your friends."
(It was a better line before e-mail.) Anyway, I took it out, but I think
it was the last time I've appeared on that page.
-
- President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most
of the mainstream media won't.
-
- Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and
Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost
all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice. In the one
significant effort by a national daily to deal with Bush's consistent
pattern of mendacity, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank could not bring
himself (or was not allowed) to utter the crucial words. Instead,
readers were treated to such complicated linguistic circumlocutions as:
Bush's statements represented "embroidering key assertions" and were
clearly "dubious, if not wrong." The President's "rhetoric has taken
some flights of fancy," he has "taken some liberties," "omitted
qualifiers" and "simply outpace[d] the facts." But "Bush lied"?
Never.
-
- Ben Bradlee explains, "Even the very best newspapers
have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight
face. No editor would dare print this version of Nixon's first comments
on Watergate for instance. 'The Watergate break-in involved matters of
national security, President Nixon told a national TV audience last
night, and for that reason he would be unable to comment on the bizarre
burglary. That is a lie.'"
-
- Part of the reason is deference to the office and the
belief that the American public will not accept a mere reporter calling
the President a liar. Part of the reason is the culture of
Washington--where it is somehow worse to call a person a liar in public
than to be one. A final reason is political. Some reporters are just
political activists with columns who prefer useful lies to the truth.
For instance, Robert Novak once told me that he "admired" Elliott Abrams
for lying to him in a television interview about illegal US acts of war
against Nicaragua because he agreed with the cause.
-
- Let us note, moreover, that Bradlee's observation,
offered in 1997, did not apply to President Clinton. Reporters were
positively eager to call Clinton a liar, although his lies were about
private matters about which many of us, including many reporters, lie
all the time. "I'd like to be able to tell my children, 'You should tell
the truth,'" Stuart Taylor Jr. of the National Journal said on Meet the
Press. "I'd like to be able to tell them, 'You should respect the
President.' And I'd like to be able to tell them both things at the same
time." David Gergen, who had worked for both Ronald Reagan and Richard
Nixon as well as Clinton and therefore could not claim to be a stranger
to official dishonesty, decried what he termed "the deep and searing
violation [that] took place when he not only lied to the country, but
co-opted his friends and lied to them." Chris Matthews kvetched,
"Clinton lies knowing that you know he's lying. It's brutal and it
subjugates the person who's being lied to. I resent deeply being
constantly lied to." George Will, a frequent apologist for the lies of
Reagan and now Bush, went so far as to insist that Clinton's
"calculated, sustained lying has involved an extraordinarily corrupting
assault on language, which is the uniquely human capacity that makes
persuasion, and hence popular government, possible."
-
- George W. Bush does not lie about sex, I
suppose--merely about war and peace. Most particularly he has
consistently lied about Iraq's nuclear capabilities as well as its
missile-delivery capabilities. Take a look at Milbank's gingerly worded
page-one October 22 Post story if you doubt me. To cite just two
particularly egregious examples, Bush tried to frighten Americans by
claiming that Iraq possesses a fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be
used "for missions targeting the United States." Previously he insisted
that a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed the
Iraqis to be "six months away from developing a weapon." Both of these
statements are false, but they are working. Nearly three-quarters of
Americans surveyed think that Saddam is currently helping Al Qaeda; 71
percent think it is likely he was personally involved in the 9/11
attacks.
-
- What I want to know is why this kind of lying is
apparently OK. Isn't it worse to refer "repeatedly to
intelligence...that remains largely unverified"--as the Wall Street
Journal puts it--in order to trick the nation into war, as Bush and
other top US officials have done, than to lie about a blowjob? Isn't it
worse to put "pressure...on the intelligence agencies to deliberately
slant estimates," as USA Today worded its report? Isn't it more damaging
to offer "cooked information," in the words of the CIA's former chief of
counterterrorism, when you are asking young men and women to die for
your lies? Don't we revile Lyndon Johnson for having done just that with
his dishonest Gulf of Tonkin resolution?
-
- Here's Bradlee again: "Just think for a minute how
history might have changed if Americans had known then that their
leaders felt the war was going to hell in a handbasket. In the next
seven years, thousands of American lives and more thousands of Asian
lives would have been saved. The country might never have lost faith in
its leaders."
-
- Reporters and editors who "protect" their readers and
viewers from the truth about Bush's lies are doing the nation--and
ultimately George W. Bush--no favors. Take a look at the names at that
long black wall on the Mall. Consider the tragic legacy of LBJ's failed
presidency. Ask yourself just who is being served when the media allow
Bush to lie, repeatedly, with impunity, in order to take the nation into
war.
-
- Copyright � 2002 The Nation http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021125&s=alterma
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