Lie, Rinse, Repeat
Bagelradio over at State of the Day takes a thorough look at how the Right manipulates the media:
The mainstream media gets played because a basic tenent of journalism is to be what FOX News falsely claims to be: fair and balanced. Afraid of being seen as supporting one point of view over another, both sides are presented, regardless of merit. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman joked, "If President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, 'Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth.'"
The mainstream media gets played because a basic tenent of journalism is to be what FOX News falsely claims to be: fair and balanced. Afraid of being seen as supporting one point of view over another, both sides are presented, regardless of merit. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman joked, "If President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, 'Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth.'"
Tags: Media Follies
posted by Management at 8:00 AM
1 Comments:
Humans willing and able to think for themselves in the US and abroad wonder how it is possible that, after everything that has been revealed about the Bush Administration's dishonesty, cruelty, and incompetance, still some 35% of the population stand behind it. One simple answer is: denial. Another simple answer: media failures. A more complete answer that includes the previous two: successful Right Wing information manipulation.
Here is how they do it, using the President's "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" 2003 State of the Union Address lie as an example.
The first step is to conceive, present, and sell the lie. The Administration comes up with something it wants the public to believe, shares it as a "talking point" with Republican politicians, Right Wing media outlets, party loyalists, and the mainstream media. The Administration itself, along with these couriers, spread the lie widely.
Sometimes the lie/distortion is disproven outright: Ambassador Joseph Wilson began exposing this particular lie in his powerful and courageous New York Times opinion piece. Wilson's disclosure was followed by a steady stream of credible evidence that the Administration knew or at least should have known it's claim was false (New Yorker, BBC, Slate, CNN, amongst others) . Eventually the Administration was forced to admit the inaccuracy and retract the infamous 16 words from the State of the Union Address.
Of course, the retraction received about as much media attention as winners of regional spelling bees, so the lie remained the truth for many.
If the retraction gets little to no coverage, the Right Wing media does not report it. If the retraction gains traction, the Right Wing media spins it as a Democratic Party attempt to embarrass Republicans. It gets turned into a "they hate our guy" pissing contest instead of a discussion of the actual story: a major piece of evidence used by the Administration to rally support for the Iraq war was untrue. Oftentimes the mainstream media falls for this and focuses on the "he said, she said" personal attack talking points instead of on the actual story.
This virulent attacking of the messenger gets far more attention than does the retraction. In the Niger-uranium example, the argument became so muddied that it took almost two years for the mainstream media to begin to discuss the actual story -- that the Bush Administration misled the public in it's attempts to justify a war that, fear-mongering visions of mushroom clouds aside, never had much passable justification.
Despite official retractions, strategy reversals, and policy changes, the Right Wing hatemongers repeat and embellish the lie.
Even two and a half years later, the lie is front and center for the likes of Ann Coulter:
In the Iraq war so far, the U.S. military has deposed a dictator who had already used weapons of mass destruction and would have used them again. As we now know, Saddam Hussein was working with al-Qaida and was trying to acquire long-range missiles from North Korea and enriched uranium from Niger.
Exactly which WMD would Saddam have used again, Ann? The ones that we are no longer even searching for? Or the ones that Rumsfeld's military is shamefully using "over there so we don't have to fight them over here?"
Read more of Ann's latest bile-fueled, falsehood-laden, hate-mongering opinion piece.
This type of bald-faced lying is a hallmark of Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and others on the Raving Right. This strategy is doubly effective because it solidifies the lie with those who missed the retraction and it gets the mainstream media to focus on the lie again, instead of on the rebunking of the lie. This obscures the real story, sometimes completely. This works to the advantage of the side that is lying. Often instead of arguing about the point in question, the Right will cry, "The Democrats are doing this for political gain," which takes the attention away from the issue, whatever it is, and turns it to partisan politics. If the story now shifts to Democrats vs. Republicans, or Liberals vs. Conservatives, or "he said, she said," the liars win because the public has been distracted by what the lie was designed to obscure.
The mainstream media gets played because a basic tenent of journalism is to be what FOX News falsely claims to be: fair and balanced. Afraid of being seen as supporting one point of view over another, both sides are presented, regardless of merit. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman joked, "If President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, 'Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth.'"
Reporting falsehoods as a "point of view" is not balanced reporting, it is lazy reporting. For example, a cursory review of what Intelligent Design proponents say reveals it as nothing more than Creationism version 2.0 -- to report on it as a viable alternative to Darwin's Theory of Evolution is to further the lie that it is a science-based theory.
Even something as seemingly innocuous as the CBS headline "Dueling Rallies Near Bush Ranch," while true, effectively distorts the reality of the situation. It does so by creating an initial perception that both sides were well-represented in Crawford when, in fact, there were some seventeen times as many anti-war protesters as there were Bush supporters.
Newly revealed Nixon-era documents quote an earlier generation's Tricky Dick saying of Vietnam, "Publicly we say one thing; actually, we do another." What our very own Tricky Dick Cheney might add is, "And then our minions spin our actions so fast and furiously the public will never know we've misinformed them yet again. Snicker, snicker, slurp slurp."
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