Lies, Damned Lies and The Media

The last US election in November was widely regarded as the dirtiest in US history. The Republicans, in particular, slung nearly ceaselessly from a never-ending supply of mud. With just over 21 months to go until Americans start making up excuses for not voting for President, the first salvo has already been fired at Barack Hussein Obama, United States Senator and proud leader of an exploratory committee to determine whether his winning smile will be able to dredge up enough cash for a run at the US presidency in 2008.

In particular, the immense right-wing press machine grabbed the following talking point and just ran with it—until the story was thoroughly debunked just a day later.

“Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?”

The allegation is that an elected US senator was indoctrinated in his youth by Islamist psychos, and that this big-eared, grinning Manchurian Candidate will show his true colors, if elected, when he throws us all to the Muslim hordes and vows his allegiance to Osama and Mohammed, in that order. As previously noted on earthli News, the word “madrassa” simply means “school” in Arabic. Colloquially, it has come to mean a Scientology-like cult center for indoctrinating new generations of suicide bombers through the putrid teachings found in the Quran.

Punish the Right-Wing Liars by Matt Taibbi (AlterNet) rounds up enough links and citations to indicate that this rumor spread like wildfire and was all over the news for at least a day, before the first barely chastened retractions appeared. Somehow, television reporting—and, in particular, political reporting—is immune to any and all slander laws. As Taibbi says:

“I found the entire affair puzzling. I know for sure that if I made a journalistic “mistake” of that magnitude, I’d be spending the rest of my life picking strawberries in the Siberian tundra. Most print journalists I know would expect the same thing; the legal ramifications alone of intentionally going to print with a story that missed by that much would guarantee that 80 cents out of every dollar you made for the next ten years would go to the victim of your libel.”

Old-timers like Rush Limbaugh discovered that they can lie openly and get away with it a long time ago. Rush peddled gems like “It has not been proven that nicotine is addictive”, “The poorest people in America are better off than the mainstream families of Europe” or “$14,400 for a family of four – that’s not so bad.” long after they’d been thoroughly debunked and proven to be lies six ways to Sunday. Didn’t matter. He kept repeating them and his listeners—the Dittoheads—kept believing them, internalizing them, and passing them on. If enough people believe it, it becomes true, no? He’s still on the air and his schtick has spawned hundreds of copycats, like Michael Savage, who further alleged on his show on Fox, that, after a hypothetical term as vice president, “Obama would then run for president with ‘Saddam Hussein’s younger grandson’ as his running mate”.

No retractions. No repercussions. Just business as usual.

Allegations like these stick in people’s minds; they affect how they think and react to future reports of a similar nature. A smear campaign of this sort, with 21 months of unfounded allegations followed by half-hearted retractions, can be used to torpedo any candidate. With no repercussions in sight, media will get more and more brazen in controlling who can even run for office. Many potential contenders will simply not consider stepping into the minefield of modern American politics. The media chooses the candidate that makes sure the machine keeps running as it is. This limits our choice and limits the effectiveness of our democracy.

It doesn’t end with lying about Barack Obama’s childhood, though. The lies and insinuation permeate everything you read about the world. Reports are tinged with little bits of innuendo that, subtly and subconsciously, nudge your mind in the approved direction—all without the benefit of fact or proof of any kind.

Take a look at any article about Iran these days. Europeans Fear US Attack on Iran as Nuclear Row Intensifies by Ian Traynor (Common Dreams) suffices as “Exhibit A”. This first quote from the article makes a completely unfounded allegation, mixes opinion with purported fact and uses an unnamed source.

“‘Iran has steadily ramped up its activity in Iraq in the last three to four months. This applies to the scope and pace of their operations. You could call these brazen activities,’ a senior US official said in London yesterday.”

Senior officials are ever so handy and oh so plentiful. This one is speaking of Iraq, where, he helpfully informs us, it is Iran’s increased activity that we must be worried about. These activities are, in the eyes of the US, “brazen”. US activities in Iraq are, of course, not brazen, by definition, since we’re the good guys. Q.E.D.

He continues:

“The perception that Iran is ascendant in the region and that there are no limits to what Iran can do – that’s what is destabilising.”

The story being sold here is that Iraq would be rolling over to have its belly scratched by the US military if it weren’t for the pesky, external influence of Iran. It only makes sense then to go wipe those bastards out first or there will never be democracy in Iraq. Because of Iran. And it’s meddling. Do I have to draw you a picture?

It is Iran’s activities that are to blame for the catastrophe in Iraq, which is described here—in what is politely called euphemism and rightly called lying—as merely being “destabilized”.

Further on, the article relies heavily on its readership knowing not one goddamned thing about the Middle East—or, in particular, Islam and Iraq—to level a nonsensical accusation and tie all terror acts together into one easily hated—and eminently nukable—enemy.

“Although the Iranians were primarily in Shia areas, they were not confined to them, the US source said, implying that they had formed links with Sunni insurgents and were helping them with booby-trap bombs aimed at Iraqi and US forces, new versions of the ‘improvised explosive devices’.”

A good reporter will make sure to switched between the aforementioned “senior official”, “administration official”, the “US source” used here, or the old standby, “experts”. Iran is primarily Shia, the minority, and is working to maintain the Shia majority inadvertently placed into power by the US when it fired every last Sunni from government almost 4 years ago. The US is about as bloody likely to help the Sunni insurgents as Iran is. That does not stop this article from alleging just that—without any supporting evidence, citing a reporter in the field or citing a study of any sort. Nothing will come of this false allegation—read as: bald-faced lie—that will doubtless mislead tens of thousands of Americans, reinforcing a completely fictitious view of the situation in Iraq. A close reading of the citation tells you that an unnamed source kind of implied that Iran had formed links with Sunnis. A quick read tells you that Iran is funding and training the insurgency. Very, very sneaky … and completely unethical.

All the better to manipulate you, my dear. And, as Matt Taibbi mentioned, all without the risk of going to jail, losing one’s job or even getting reprimanded. It is time to face up to it: this type of writing and behavior gets rewarded in US media today—that’s why there’s so damned much of it. The media is able to do what it does without getting sued because no one expects it to tell the truth. Television and even newspaper media are all swimming in the same unclean waters—those previously infested only by the likes of the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News. With all of their flashy graphics and officious reporting, CNN and Fox confuse people into thinking that they are more than that.

These stories are invaluable as distractors; they keep people from picking up information that would be dangerous. Stories like this one, Iraq war costs could top $2 trillion by Tom Regan (Christian Science Monitor), don’t even show up as a faded blip on the radar. It might be picked up to serve as a lead-in to illustrate how liberals are prone to exaggeration. It doesn’t matter that one of the authors of the paper is Joseph Stiglitz, president of the World Bank for 6 years, a Nobel Prize–winning economist and author of several insightful books about the global economy. As far as the media—and its few parent companies—are concerned, this is a very dangerous story. Americans don’t need to know where their money is going—and especially how much of it. They don’t need to be shown what 2 Trillion could pay for instead, like health care, fixing New Orleans or our school systems. The media corporations find that the money is much more wisely invested in corporate welfare. They’re all bolstering the economy Bush was so bubbly about last week in his State of the Union address, of which they are a part. The economy of big business. Don’t expect any other kind of news to trickle out of this kind of a system.

If we are to survive in a world run like this, we need more reporters like Ze Frank, who brilliantly retells the story of the last 6 years of putting up with our administration as a schoolyard allegory in It’s the Lying That Hurts.

“…so George asked Tony if he knew anything about Saddam and Tony said that he’d heard that Saddam had bought a whole bunch of ninja throwing stars from a kid at one of the downtown schools and was hiding them in his locker. So, anyways, Joseph, who’d spent his whole freshman year at the downtown school, overheard the conversation and decided to go down there and check it out. When he went down there, they were like, ‘who the hell’s Saddam … and what the hell’s a ninja throwing star?’ … So, Joseph told one of George’s kinda friends, who’s also named George, to tell George that Tony was probably making shit up. But then, a few days later, George got up in front of the whole cafeteria and told everybody that Saddam had a whole bunch of ninja throwing stars and that the other George would back him up. Not only that, but he said that that was why Saddam wouldn’t let anyone look in his locker, not even the hall monitors. So everybody said, crap, I don’t want to get hit with a ninja throwing star, and, besides, Saddam’s kind of a bully anyway, so they all got together in the playground and beat the crap out of him.”

He goes on to cover the Plame affair in hilarious detail. Serious reporting of facts is best clad as humor in order to slip our media overlords.