Thursday, July 13, 2006

Kill The Messenger? Even when the messenger is on your side.

This article by John Stauber is right on the money. The US corporate "News" media played along with dubya's attack on Iraq and now that it's blowing up in the Neo-con's faces their scapegoat is? The corporate "News" media of course. You know that ol', "Liberal" News Media, that with a few exceptions were accomplices in this war, and have coddled dubya for the last 5 years(and counting).
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Kill The Messenger? Pro-War Advocates Should Blame Themselves for the Mess in Iraq

As conditions in Iraq continue to deteriorate, supporters of the war are casting around for someone to blame, and journalists are becoming an increasingly popular scapegoat — an ironic turn of events, since the mainstream media's uncritical support for the war helped get us into this mess in the first place.
In our 2003 book,
Weapons of Mass Deception, Sheldon Rampton and I described how newspapers and television networks behaved like a propaganda arm of the Bush Administration, cheerleading for the attack on Iraq. These days, however, journalists are coming under attack from pro-war forces, which have gone so far as to accuse individual reporters, editors and even the entire mainstream media of outright treason.
A
chorus of right-wing media figures recently accused the New York Times of treason in response to its publication of a story describing efforts by the Bush administration to monitor terrorist money laundering using SWIFT, an international banking correspondence system — even though, as the Boston Globe and others have pointed out, "American intelligence and law enforcement access to SWIFT's database was not secret in any meaningful sense, having been disclosed more than three years ago" by U.S. government officials and on the SWIFT website. The Weekly Standard called the Times a "national security threat," and Melanie Morgan, a right-wing radio talk personality affiliated with the Republican activist group, Move America Forward, said that Times editor Bill Keller should be tried for treason and that she "would have no problem with him being sent to the gas chamber."
The charge of media treason has also followed news reports on human rights abuses by U.S. forces at
Abu Ghraib, Haditha and elsewhere. Following reports on Haditha, for example, commentators on the conservative FreeRepublic.com website expressed the hope that "all reporters that had ANYTHING to do with this report are brought up on treason charges, and hung."
Pin the Blame on Cronkite
These cries of "hang 'em high" reflect the stage that we have entered in the Iraq fiasco. We have reached a point at which everyone — supporters and opponents of the war alike — can see that things are going badly. The battle now, therefore, is over who gets the blame. Opponents of the war like myself have an easy case to make: the war was a bad idea from the outset, and the blame should go to the politicians who started it.
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