Truth: Just Another Victim in US Press
by Ken Bell

Writing in the London Telegraph, renowned British military historian John Keegan recently observed that “the British and American media retail with evident satisfaction every scrap of information that undermines any expectation by readers and viewers of a successful outcome to the Iraqi involvement. The media’s message is clear: Iraq is a mess that should never have been allowed to happen. Yet media people are precisely the sort who know perfectly well that wars usually end in a mess . . .

“What monopolizes the headlines and prime time television at the moment is news from Iraq on the activity of small, localised minorities struggling to entrench themselves before full peace is imposed and an effective state structure is restored. The news is, in fact, very repetitive: disorder in Najaf and Fallujah, misbehaviour by a tiny handful of US Army reservists—not properly trained regular soldiers—in one prison. There is nothing from Iraq’s other 8,000 towns and villages, nothing from Kurdistan, where complete peace prevails, very little from Basra, where British forces are on good terms with the residents.”

Indeed, the disinformation campaign is truly extraordinary. While barely noting the barbarous beheading of Nicholas Berg, burying the discovery of a sarin-filled artillery shell, ignoring the Saddam torture video, constantly quoting disaffected CIA and State Department “intelligence” sources to engender doubt with “credibility,” exaggerating every violent incident (remember that Moqtada al Sadr’s insurgency was supposed to be the beginning of a massive uprising by Shiites), reciting casualty statistics as if they were religious chants, conveniently ignoring the constant exhumation of ever more mass graves and the accumulating evidence of Saddam’s crimes against humanity, the New York Times has had over 60—yes, 60—front page articles on the Abu Ghraib incident, with the Washington Post lagging only slightly behind.

The mainstream liberal media has decided that, no matter how much collateral damage they may inflict on America, the Bush administration must go, and the truth be damned.

In contrast to the constant images of the ugly, but comparatively trivial occurrences at Abu Ghraib, how often have ABC, NBC or CBS shown us excerpts of Saddam’s four-minute torture video with its decapitations, severed tongues, fingers chopped away—or images of Nick Berg’s severed head?

Mainstream American media outlets don’t report news anymore, they advocate, insinuate, propagandize, and yes, they lie.

Of course, the Times has had a tradition of covering up the deeds of brutal dictators since the early thirties. But for the rest, have they no shame?

–From the June 2004 Austin Review