opinion by Norman Solomon
MEDIA'S WAR BOOSTERS UNLIKELY TO VOICE REGRET
The superstar columnist
George Will has an impressive vocabulary. Too bad it doesn't include the
words "I'm sorry."
A year 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 Representative 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, Representative 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 US 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 US 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 ten 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 co-author of "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You." For
an excerpt and other information, go to:
www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target
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