Politics: An Old Outrage Revisited

If you rely on network television for your news, chances are you've missed a hugely important story recently which goes a long way toward explaining how we ended up in Iraq.

Last Sunday, the New York Times published an expose implicating the Pentagon and several news outlets in what amounted to a brazen propaganda campaign in the run-up to the Iraq war. Specifically, the so-called "independent military analysts" -- those familiar high-ranking ex-generals who appeared to be giving their objective point of view on the invasion -- were not independent at all but rather had significant ties to pro-war political groups and/or defense contracting companies and were part of a well designed propagandistic "Pentagon information apparatus." The news outlets who hired them either failed to do due diligence in discovering those ties, or knew about them and ignored them (Most likely the latter, since at least one magazine uncovered those ties and asked NBC News for comment back in 2002).

Lest this be dismissed as wild conspiracy theory, you should know that there is a Congressional inquiry under way and that the Pentagon has suspended its program since the story broke.

So why haven't you heard anything about it? Because the news networks have effectively blacked the story out. They refuse to cover a story of such national signficance because it involves gross malpractice on their part.

I highly recommend this post from Glenn Greenwald's blog, which goes further than the New York Times in detailing the conflicts of interest of some of the generals, and which offers great examples of the pro-war chatter offered up by these "analysts" as the Iraq war began to unfold.

The following facts may seem obvious, but I think they're worth pointing out in the light of this controversy.

1. The role of the media is, ideally, to speak truth to power, to hold the decision-makers accountable, to make government transparent to its citizens. The press freedoms enshrined in the 1st Amendment derive from democracy's need for an informed citizenry, and the public airwaves are lent by the American people to private companies with the understanding that those companies will provide a public service in exchange (rather than using them for exclusively commercial gain). The free press ought to function in an adversarial role, asking the questions that keep government officials honest. When instead they simply echo the government's lines and become war cheerleaders without asking hard questions, they undermine democracy. They may spout the party line because of conflicts of interest (see NBC/General Electric/war profiteering) or simply because of cowardice -- an unwillingness to appear unpatriotic during wartime -- but the effect is the same: they fail, utterly, to protect your interests.

2. The myriad failures of our free press before and during the Iraq war are amply documented.

3. We are in a very troubling place. Take a step back and look at the situation: As the Bush Administration banged the war drum, the press jumped onto the bandwagon almost wholesale. The media (the Fourth Estate, which supposedly represents "the mob") was the last best defense to puncture the government's shifting rationales and divert us from a war that has now left thousands dead and millions displaced. Instead, its talking heads blithely and admiringly chit-chatted with government propagandists on air, cheerleading the way to war. Now it refuses to so much as acknowledge this reprehensible conduct. And we live in an era in which their behavior has become so normalized as not to raise an eyebrow. They will not be held accountable because there is virtually no public expectation for them to be adversarial. To the contrary, when they are, they are pilloried and taken off the air for expressing unpatriotic views.

Irrespective of your political affiliation, you ought to find this state of affairs deeply unsettling, especially as we move toward an election in which a major candidate has expressed -- sometimes in song -- his hawkish tendencies toward Iran.