Business As Usual

 

Jonathan Schwarz has (with Michael Gerber) written for the New Yorker, The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, and The Wall Street Journal, and contributed to Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live. He also co-edits a website called A Tiny Revolution.

In March 2003, the United States swept into Iraq based on WMD evidence that was equal parts foam-flecked hype and brazen fabrication. This was obvious at the time, but for the most part, the U.S. media failed to point it out.

Today, thank God, things are completely different. Now if the Bush administration were to make false statements about banned weapons in Iraq, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the networks would be all over them like a cheap biochemical suit.

Ha ha! No, just kidding, of course. Nothing has changed since the media swallowed the WMD garbage in the runup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The administration is still making blatantly false statements about banned weapons in Iraq, and the American media still won't call them on it. In fact, the media barely seem to notice"even when the false claims are made by President Bush, on primetime television.

Here's a statement by Bush at his April 13 press conference: "[Iraq] had long-range missiles that were undeclared to the United Nations."

If this were true, it would be very important indeed. In addition to biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, the United Nations had forbidden Iraq from possessing any missile with a range greater than 150 km. (This is why before the war, UNMOVIC, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, ordered the destruction of Iraq's al-Samoud missiles, even though Iraq had declared them, and the al-Samouds could just fly a few miles over the limit.) So if Iraq had such hidden missiles, they would be the first and only banned weapons of any kind we've found in Iraq.

But unfortunately for President Bush, it wasn't true. According to all the information released by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, Iraq possessed the same number of undeclared long-range missiles as I do: zero.

Was Bush consciously lying when he made his claim? Who the hell knows? He might not even know himself. My opinion is that, sadly, he probably wasn't; I say "sadly" because we should all be praying that these people are trying to mislead us. If they really believe what they're saying, we're in even more trouble than I think.

In any case, the important question isn't whether Bush was lying on purpose, or whether he just bumped into an untruth in the course of his usual weaving around. Government officials from every party in every country on Earth will mislead the public if they can get away with it. The important question is: why is the U.S. media still letting the Bush administration get away with it?

Remember that Bush made this claim on live national television, at only the third prime time press conference of his presidency. Every news outlet had one of their most prominent reporters there, their big guns. And Bush's inaccurate missile statement didn't come out of nowhere"it was in direct response to a question about "how you got it so wrong" about Iraq generally and WMD in particular. This was toward the beginning of the press conference, so there were 35 minutes left for other reporters to ask him about it. Yet not a single one did.

Moreover, the press conference was front-page news the next morning and covered extensively for 24 hours. But according to Nexis, none of these stories mentioned that the president claimed to have found weapons in Iraq that weren't there. This is particularly astonishing because"later in the press conference-"Bush left the door wide open by stating, "I expect information that comes to my desk to be real and valid... I can't make good decisions unless I get valid information." Since then, just one journalist" Bill Press of MSNBC"has pointed out Bush was wrong, in his weekly Tribune Media column.

I asked Press how this was possible.

"Well, I've never seen a bigger bunch of pussycats than this White House press corps," he explained. "The Bush administration knows they'll roll over no matter what claims they make. They simply have not held the president accountable."

Reporters in Washington, says Press, are scared: "They're afraid of retaliation. As John Dean says, this administration is even more vindictive than Nixon's. If you doubt that, just ask Richard Clarke and Joseph Wilson."

"More vindictive than Richard Nixon" has a nice ring to it. It's like being "taller than Manute Bol." Still, while this is clearly part of the problem, there must be more to it. Things are particularly bad now, but the years between the Nixon and George W. Bush administrations were hardly a golden age of American journalism.

The problem, I believe, is much simpler and much larger than Karl Rove (as unpleasant as he is) or any individual journalists (as timid as they are). The problem is that no matter how many quavering columns David Broder writes about the sanctity of the First Amendment, the U.S. media will still be mostly big corporations"corporations that are legally obligated to make as much money as possible.

And despite what they tell you at the Newseum"the museum about news run by the Freedom Forum"causing trouble by holding governments accountable never has been and never will be good business. Causing trouble causes stock prices to drop. Causing trouble makes advertisers flee and profit margins go down. That, more than anything else, explains the never-ending disaster that is the U.S. media.

In other words, the situation is even more unsettling than it at first appears. The fact that reporters didn't ask Bush the most obvious questions at his press conference probably wasn't a failure for the U.S. media. By the standards that really matter, it may have been a big success.

Disclaimer: Jonathan Schwarz is a media consultant for Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign. This represents his personal opinion and not that of the campaign.

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Published: Apr 23 2004