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Media’s
War Boosters Unlikely to Voice Regret
by
Norman Solomon
July
17, 2003
The
superstar columnist George Will has an impressive vocabulary. Too bad it
doesn’t include the words “I’m sorry.”
Ten
months ago, Will led the media charge when a member of Congress dared to say
that President Bush would try to deceive the public about Iraq. By now, of
course, strong evidence has piled up that Bush tried and succeeded.
But
back in late September, when a media frenzy erupted about Rep. Jim McDermott’s
live appearance from Baghdad on ABC’s “This Week” program, what riled the punditocracy
as much as anything else was McDermott’s last statement during the interview:
“I think the president would mislead the American people.”
First
to wave a media dagger at the miscreant was Will, a regular on the ABC
television show. Within minutes, on the air, he denounced “the most disgraceful
performance abroad by an American official in my lifetime.” But the syndicated
columnist was just getting started.
Back
at his computer, George Will churned out a piece that appeared in The
Washington Post two days later, ripping into McDermott and a colleague on the
trip, Rep. David Bonior. “Saddam Hussein finds American collaborators among
senior congressional Democrats,” Will wrote.
There
was special venom for McDermott in the column. Will could not abide the
spectacle of a Congressperson casting doubt on George W. Bush’s utter veracity.
“McDermott’s accusation that the president -- presumably with Cheney, Powell,
Rumsfeld, Rice and others as accomplices -- would use deceit to satisfy his
craving to send young Americans into an unnecessary war is a slander.”
During
early October, the national media echo chamber kept rocking with countless
reprises of Will’s bugle call. One of the main reasons for the furor was
widespread media denial that “the president would mislead the American people.”
An
editorial in the Rocky Mountain News fumed that “some of McDermott’s words,
delivered via TV, were nothing short of outrageous.” In Georgia, the Augusta
Chronicle declared: “For a U.S. congressman to virtually accuse the president
of lying while standing on foreign soil -- especially the soil of a nation that
seeks to destroy his nation and even tried to assassinate a former U.S.
president -- is an appallingly unpatriotic act.”
Nationally,
on the Fox News Channel, the one-man bombast factory Bill O’Reilly accused
McDermott of “giving aid and comfort to Saddam while he was in Baghdad.”
O’Reilly said that thousands of his viewers “want to know why McDermott would
give propaganda material to a killer and accuse President Bush of being a liar
in the capital city of the enemy.”
A
syndicated column by hyper-moralist Cal Thomas followed with similar
indignation: “We have seen Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington and David Bonior
of Michigan -- the Bozos of Baghdad – accuse President Bush of lying for
political gain about Iraq’s threat to civilization.”
But
such attacks did not come only from right-wing media stalwarts. Plenty of
middle-road journalists were happy to go the way of the blowing wind.
During
one of her routine appearances on Fox television, National Public Radio
political correspondent Mara Liasson commented on McDermott and Bonior: “These
guys are a disgrace. Look, everybody knows it’s 101, politics 101, that you
don’t go to an adversary country, an enemy country, and badmouth the United
States, its policies and the president of the United States. I mean, these guys
ought to, I don’t know, resign.”
Now
that it’s evident the president of the United States not only “would” mislead
the American people but actually did -- with the result of a horrendous war --
it’s time to ask when such pundits, who went after McDermott with a vengeance
last fall, might publicly concede that he made a valid and crucial point.
To
use George Will’s inadvertently apt words, it was prescient to foresee that
“the president -- presumably with Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice and others as
accomplices -- would use deceit to satisfy his craving to send young Americans
into an unnecessary war.”
Much
more importantly, if a mainstream political journalist like Mara Liasson was so
quick to suggest 10 months ago that McDermott resign for inopportunely seeking
to prevent a war, when will she advocate that the president resign for
dishonestly promoting a war -- or, failing resignation, face impeachment?
Norman Solomon is Executive
Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accuracy.org) and a syndicated
columnist. His latest book is Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell
You (Context Books, 2003) with Reese Erlich. For an excerpt and other
information, go to: www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target. Email: mediabeat@igc.org
*
The 45-minute video of Norman’s appearance on C-SPAN “Washington Journal” a few
days ago can be seen at: http://video.c-span.org:8080/ramgen/gdrive/iraq_wj070603_solomon.rm
(or via direct link at the top of www.accuracy.org)