Commonweal Institute Blog

Yeah, but how can you focus on countering the negative effect of the mainstream media?

There is a great post on The Carpetbagger Report from a few days ago about the mainstream media's (specifically Time magazine's) ignoring the prosecutor purge scandal.

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/10367.html

What explains the failure of the mainstream media to cover the purge scandal for so long, and so many other scandals? Do you think somebody just set up newspaper editors to cheat on their wives, and threatened to tell if the editors wouldn’t play ball when they come back some day and ask for something?

It wouldn’t be that hard to do, when you think about it. People wouldn’t talk about it.

The press's failure to cover the purge scandal appears to me to be similar to their failure to take on other significant problems. To quote my paraphrase (http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/CIBlog/2007/03/press_non-coverage_of_election_fraud.html#more) of Ron Wolf's explanation of why the press hasn't had much to say about election problems:

"These days, having been battered by years of accusations that they are liberally biased, the press takes cover by quoting the words of this party versus that opposing party. They don’t like stories in which it’s this party against no opposition, as that situation forces the press to be in opposition to a political force. The press does not want to be one of those forces themselves.

"Ron Wolf’s advice? THE PRESS HELPS THOSE THAT HELP THEMSELVES. That means that citizens have to put up stiff opposition to [the problem], on a sustained basis, in order to get coverage."

The purge scandal is just one more example of a story the MSM couldn't bring themselves to cover. That's why the bloggers and other forms of citizen journalism and ranting are essential--it takes a lot of noise to help the MSM feel comfortable sticking their necks out.

It takes a lot to influence the powerful, doesn't it?

Speaking of the press: ever since the months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there have been a few reports in the newspapers that the Central Intelligence Agency was casting aspersions on the intelligence the White House was relying on to justify the war. The CIA has never given a position on whether the war is needed or justified or said that Bush is wrong to go to war. But doesn't it seem much more likely that the CIA is an extremely right wing organization than a left wing one? After all, even if the people working for them and at least a lot of the leadership really wanted a war for their own reasons, there are a lot of reasons for them to not want to tie their credibility to what they know is faulty information. They and their personnel, present and former, could use other means of promoting the Iraq war, and still be motivated to make the statements in the media. If the CIA got behind faulty information, they would have to make a choice between whether they would be involved in scamming the American people and the world once the military had invaded Iraq and no weapons were found- so: 1) Imagine the incredible difficulties involved in pulling off a hoax that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. Imagine all the people you would have to be able to show the weapons to- the inspectors from the UN / the international community, the American press, statesmen, etc. Then imagine the difficulties of substantiating that story to people who would examine it- the lack of witnesses to a production plant that made the weapons or to transportation operations or storage of the weapons during Hussein's regime of them. 2) If the story fell apart upon inspection or the CIA tried not to hoax it at all, imagine the loss of credibility they would suffer. The CIA, it is safe to bet, does not want to be known to the American people as a group that lies to them to send them to war. Even within the CIA there could be disagreement among people about how involved they should be in promoting the war or the neo-con agenda more broadly, so the CIA would have to worry about lying to and managing its own people after trying so hard to get them to trust their superiors in the agency, and perhaps there simply might be too many people in the agency who knew enough about what was going on in Iraq to know if someone was deceiving people to promote this war.

So there is a lot of reason to be cautious against being seen as endorsing what they knew was false intelligence even if they were very strong supporters of going to war.