More Tales of a Liberal Media

Media bias is a question mulled often by the media itself and by its usual victims: conservatives. It is truly amazing with what perseverence and clarity of purpose the extreme right is able to continue in the face of this truly debilitating onslaught.

Televisual Fairyland by George Monbiot (Common Dreams) provides some comparisons of media bias one way or another. If you’ve read Manufacturing Consent, this theory will be very familiar. He actually covers two related points using the recent resignation (sacking?) of Dan Rather over at CBS as an example.

Grovelling is an art form

While “CBS should have taken more care”, their incorrect allegations also, in no way “suggest that all the allegations made about his [Bush’s] war record [are] false”. That is the natural conclusion the Bush machine wants people to draw, but it does not follow, no matter how hard they try to get you to believe that it does. Just because one guy says that 2 + 2 is 5 does not mean that the guy who says it’s 3 is correct. That’s the first point: there’s plenty of evidence that Bush evaded the draft for Vietnam, just like most of his cronies, but we won’t hear any more about it. In fact, we never really heard about it. The only evidence that was actually aired was the insubstantiated kind … the kind that could be disproved. Goddamned liberal media.

The other point is this:

“…I think it is safe to assume that if the network had instead broadcast unsustainable allegations about John Kerry, none of its executives would now be looking for work. How many people have lost their jobs … for repeating bogus stories … about Kerry’s record in Vietnam? How many were sacked for misreporting the Jessica Lynch affair? Or for claiming that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program in 2003? Or that he was buying uranium from Niger, or using mobile biological weapons labs, or had a hand in 9/11? How many people were sacked, during Clinton’s presidency, for broadcasting outright lies about the Whitewater affair? The answer, in all cases, is none.”

Any swerving from this standard operating procedure is greeted with stern disapproval and swift punishment, even if you’re a total slut for the administration like Rather, who, soon after 9/11, said “George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions and, you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where”. Nice to see that objective outlook in our top newsfolk. A couple of years and one bad story later and Rather’s just another part of the “liberal media conspiracy”.

Those two concepts together create a powerful weapon for the scrupleless (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Rove). Since an accusation is obviated by a single piece of disproven evidence, there’s an opportunity to plant the false evidence in the first place, “discover it” and disprove it. All pre-emptively. Bush’s war record is shaky and the news media is running out of ways of ignoring the issue. Release faked evidence, run it, disprove it and no one’s willing to touch the idea again! Genius!

Let a system like that run for a little while and, after a while, it runs itself. The media implicitly “understand … what is permissible and what is not.” The people, in turn, receive their information through this fear-distorted lens, as in any totalitarian system, and “the story they [hear] about the world veers further and further from reality.” Media that diverges from that version is “denounced as … traitor[ous]” or false.

Civilian deaths in Iraq

A more recent, concrete example of this effect is the media’s treatment of the recently released Lancet article on civilian deaths in Iraq, Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey (PDF). I’ve heard this article completely denounced on CNN while the anchor sagely nodded. In all likelihood, neither the denouncer nor the anchor had read the 8 page article, which carefully came up with a “conservative” estimate of 100,000 deaths. In fact, “The risk of death was estimated to be 2·5-fold (95% CI 1·6-4·2) higher after the invasion”. Because Fallujah skewed the numbers so massively, they even calculated without it, in which case the risk was 1·5-fold.

However, “The inclusion of this estimate does not mean that investigators believe that either bias has occurred.” Fat chance, gentlemen. Just because you said that more than 0 civilians were killed is enough for you to be accused of bias by the the attack dogs of the liberal media. The data from the Fallujah sector is no more a skewed data point than “the cluster in Thaura (Sadr City), the site of the most intense fighting in Baghdad, [which fell] by random chance … in an unscathed neighbourhood with no reported deaths from the months of recent clashes.”. If anything, offering to calculate without the Fallujah sector is more of a sign of support for the right’s view of the war. Unfortunately for them, nothing but complete subservience will be accepted. The report is being broadly discounted as biased and grossly inaccurate. Though perhaps the right will be able to salvage something; maybe they can use the fact that so many people were slaughtered in Fallujah to somehow show how good other Iraqis have it, in comparison.

Just to be clear though (since we are not a mouthpiece of the right), the study concludes that the number of civilian deaths “is probably about 100000 people, and may be much higher”. And it’s getting worse every day with “violence [as the] major public-health problem in Iraq”.

If the media decides to touch the issue at all, it’s to soften it up from the harsh scientific overtones of hard numbers like “100,000 dead. Probably 200,000”. What the NYT Death Chart Omitted by Dave Lindorff (CounterPunch) discusses a chart of Iraqi deaths published by the New York Times earlier this year. It showed how “202 people died ‘as a result of the insurgency’” in the first two weeks of the year. Multiply 25 by 200 and you get only 4000 deaths per year, a little under the Lancet’s estimate. So what gives? Why is the liberal media hiding all of these civilian deaths from my concerned eyes? Turns out the chart, though pretty, covers neither “the number of Iraqi insurgents killed by U.S. forces” nor those “accidentally killed by coalition forces”.

A useful chart, nonetheless. About as accurate and done with the same intellectual honesty as a Don Juan who lists as sexual partners only women with whom he was in love.

The irony doesn’t stop there. Not only does the Times lie about the number of Iraqis killed (yeah, it’s lying, because most people will not question the Times’ numbers or bother to read the fine print. And yeah, propaganda’s lying). Check out the word “accidental”. As Lindorff points out:

“Of course, most of the civilians killed by U.S. and “coalition” forces are killed “accidentally” only by the most strained definition of the term. The truth is that American aircraft are dropping bombs, including anti-personnel weapons and, reportedly, napalm, as well as 500 and 1000 lb. explosives once known in the trade as “block busters,” on urban targets all the time.”

Compared with the “prodigious” numbers the US, sorry, the coalition, racks up, the insurgents (“freedom fighters” or “patriots” if the roles were reversed) are far more “effective and selective in their attacks”, killing far fewer civilians. But, the liberal media brings us the picture of 200 civilian deaths, leaving us to dig out the truth on our own. Why is that? Which media is the right talking about — the one that’s trying to undermine the war? Where is that media?

US Saves “tens of thousands”

Whereas the Lancet article gets reamed for its careful, lowball estimate, I’m sure no one will question Wolfowitz’s assertion in Bush nearly triples request for tsunami relief that the US has “helped save ‘tens of thousands of lives’”.

There is no doubt that the US is helping, but just keep an eye out for the play that number will get. See how many people ask for proof before simply repeating the number as if it were handed down from on high. It’s not that important — it’s just interesting that the Lancet publishes a study with scientific and statistical underpinnings and it gets discounted right away because it comes to the wrong conclusion. Come to the “right” conclusion (no pun intended) and there’s no proof required.