Editorial: Know your enemy

The following editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News on Friday, Sept. 1:
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Trying to put wind into the flagging sails of their Iraq policy, President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld played good cop-bad cop in speeches to the American Legion convention this week. Thursday, Bush said of war critics, "Many of these folks are sincere and they're patriotic, but they could not be more wrong." But two days before, Rumsfeld portrayed journalists as fifth columnists and compared the administration's opponents to appeasers of Adolf Hitler.
Given how badly the war is going and how even some leading conservatives are publicly questioning our mission in Iraq, the president has no choice but to go on the rhetorical offensive. But the defense secretary's crude speech was, to put it with extreme delicacy, not helpful to the cause.
Invoking Hitler is designed not to invite understanding but to obscure it for the sake of manipulation. [. . .]

That's sort-of from Texas' Dallas Morning News. Sort of because we avoid linking to them. Instead you can read it at the Fort Wayne News Sentinal. But it sounds interesting, huh? Billie, Eddie and two others drew this to our attention on Friday. They weren't pleased. If you're thinking, "Well Donald Rumsfeld needs to be called out and at least a silly, conservative Belo corporation paper is doing that" you need to read on.

Aside from the Cindy Sheehan crowd, who in this country is advocating that we should appease terrorists?


They slime so well, don't they? The same paper that gladly and proudly ran a full page ad, November 22, 1963, accusing JFK of being "a communist stooge" and worse. November 22, 1963 is, of course, the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas. It was a 'warm welcome' from the start thanks to the likes of Dallas Morning News.

So the tired paper that drove off competition and now, as Billie points out, can't make it through a day without AP, The Washington Post and The New York Times to fill out their "thread-bare pages" (Billie again), is in a tizzy that Rumsfeld is sliming and they go on to slime Cindy Sheehan (and her "crowd") as terrorist appeasers.

Nice, no? Slimey is as slimey does and no one does it quite effectively as Dallas Morning News which, any of our Texas readers can tell you, launched a, we're sure, uncooridnated attack on those saying no to war in the lead up and early days of the war. That meant trashing Sheryl Crow for a Grammy nomination (and being so stupid that they argued that, instead of Crow, a woman, not eligible due to when her recording came out, who had 'performed' a laughable song, should have been nominated). That was in the arts section. In the metro section they made sport of Michael Moore (who we weren't aware lived in Dallas or visited in during the Academy Awards but all their local columnists had to weigh in). A metro columnist also got in a shot comparing their local peace activists to terrorists. In the sports section, they attacked Steve Nash and others and said they should shut up because the country didn't have a draft. Oh, that's how it works? Only if a nation has a draft should citizens weigh in with their opinions on an issue as important as war? And the Dixie Chicks went from front page news for releasing an album -- front page news of the main section -- to non-stop targets throughout the paper in less than a year's time!

Well, surely in the op-ed section (if not the editorials), readers of the rag could hear the views of those against the war without all the sliming, right? Not likely. Occassionaly, they'll run one of Ellen Goodman's column. Otherwise, readers mainly got War Cheerleader Thomas Friedman, the wacky Cal Thomas, old man Willie (Safire) and others. Why even their local voices were rushing to war. In fact one local voice . . . Oh wait, he wasn't a local voice. And the readers finally forced the paper to stop presenting the reprinted Weekly Standard columnist as a local voice.

We love our Texas readers because we realize the crap they're up against and how hard they have to fight. (And they fight hard.) That includes AP articles running in their state's biggest newspaper that, some would argue, are carefully cut to present only one view. (An AP article on dee jays who locked themselves into a broadcast room and refused to follow corporates dictates not to play the Dixie Chicks' songs is especially infamous among our Texas readers. As Eddie pointed out, "In the pre-online days, they could probably get away with dropping paragraphs and information. These days, anyone can find the original AP article online and see how they butchered it to make it fit their own purposes.") That also includes local stations that air, on sports radio, a call for Susan Sarandon to be shot. What a wonderful media landscape.

All these efforts to demonize and suppress take a lot of time. Which is probably why the state's biggest newspaper has to pad out their main section with so many reports from other newspapers and the AP. Probably don't have a great deal of time to actually cover the news when you're too busy attempting to figure out how to spin it. Time being limited, they dispense with need for corrections. Which is why they never corrected a column (metro) that claimed the "dot" worn by Hindu women signified that they were married. One of our regular readers pointed that out in real time. Though the columnist disappeared for a week or so (punishment?) the paper never ran a correction.

From Snopes:

Claim: The red dot on a Hindu woman's forehead is nothing more than an indicator of her marital status.
Status: False.

It doesn't indicate marital status. But no need to correct it if you're not in the business of informing. Eddie reports that "one of the buildings downtown" (Dallas) "actually has a motto on it about the job being to present all sides. Too bad the paper's not interested in living up to it." We'd agree. We'd also say it's too bad (and we know readers feel us on this) that when the city had the largest rally it had ever had (and one of the largest in the country -- the police estimated it was as large as 500,000 so you know it passed the million mark) an independent media program elected to air a supposed independent voice who was nothing but a flunky for the paper -- it's Spanish version.

We weren't surprised to hear him slam some of the students participating, isn't that the way of The Dallas Morning News? After you've tarred and feathered peace advocates as terrorists (the editorial board only sees them as terrorist appeasers), what's left to do but slam students?

Our Texas readers regularly assure us that a left is alive and well and fighting in Texas. (We believe them). They're up against a lot. Openly right-wing chatterers around the radio dial, sports-talk radio that regularly engages in the sport of demonizing anti-war activists and regularly drops to their knees for the Bully Boy (Eddie notes that although it's billed as sports-talk, the "big boys" also spend a great deal of time discussing TV shows such as The Shield). They've got an NPR station that offers little more than syndicated programming (even airs Gas Air with Terry Gross twice a day -- apparently there's some unwritten rule prohibiting the creation of too much local programming) and brings on a Joe Lieberman-lover to provide bits of local commentary (during their airing of NPR's Morning Edition) from 'the left.' (Billie swears to hear the woman's attempt at "cultured" voice is to break down in hysterics.) We get to read about their local morning Fox "News" Blonde-zilla who snears at the mere mention of George Clooney while providing entertainment gossip. From TV, to radio, to print, it's pretty much wall-to-wall "The right-wing is right!" -- and it's provided not just by the openly conservative but by the jokes who pass themselves off as centrist and neutral. The DFW area (Dallas-Fort Worth, we learned to make the distincintion long ago when an error here prompted e-mails noting "Dallas isn't the Dallas you think! Even the Cowboys aren't actually in Dallas!") does have an Air America outlet but most of our readers stopped listening when Randi Rhodes was shoved aside to air another program in her time slot. (Instead of listening to it hours later, our readers in the area stream the show online.)

We realize what they're up against and we salute them. They spoke out before the war, they spoke out in the early days. It wasn't easy for them to call it a tragic mistake and an effort that would fail when all around them the local media was in cheerlead mode (even the BBC ended up being dropped from their second PBS station for not being sufficiently rah-rah -- they now have only one PBS station, the second one now airs what we understand to be faith healers).

For everyone in a similar environment, we applaud you. Guess what? You were right. You were right when all of your media outlets were wrong. You were right and spoke out when demonization was the only trick in the media's bag.

As you very well know, being right didn't prevent the war. Being right won't end it either. You've demonstrated you can stand up to anything and we applaud you for that and urge you to continue to stand up against the illegal war.

Know your enemy. They haven't change. They were flat out wrong. They won't own up to that. Instead of providing a forum for the voices that were right, they still want to smear. While trashing Donald Rumsfeld (deservedly) their knee-jerk response is still to smear Cindy Sheehan. That's who they are, that's what they do.

If you wonder why they accept the lie that "We were all wrong" it's because if 'everyone' was wrong, then their mistakes (bias) was unavoidable. But everyone wasn't wrong. Alarms were sounded. They didn't want to cover that. They looked the other way to sell you the war they wanted, that they supported, that they cheerleaded. They echoed the administration's lies and presented them as facts. (Hint: Facts don't usually blow up in your face.) They urged the mob mentality. (Apparently, for The Dallas Morning News, that goes at least as far back as 1963.) They weighed in with editorials, op-eds, articles, features, on air commentary that encouraged their audiences to shout down voices objecting to the illegal war. The demonization of so many wouldn't have been possible without the mainstream media.

Why wouldn't they cover the Downing Street Memos? It demonstrates, to audiences who may have absorbed the we-were-all-wrong nonsense, that the claims were being questioned in real time. It demonstrates how miserably they, big media, shirked their responsibilities.

They have no interest in covering that. Just as today, they have no interest in covering the peace movement. Their Bully Boy's lost some shine so they have to treat him less like the Lord Jesus and more like a mere mortal. (Mere mortal still being a considerable step up for the Bully Boy.) The fanzine writing days are over and we're sure they sobbed a little when they had to take down their posters. But don't kid yourself that collectively they're doing a better job today.

When one of them breaks an important story (either through strong reporting or just dumb luck) they don't echo that. They don't echo it the way they did the 'reporting' that led us into war. When Nancy A. Youssef revealed that, yes, Virginia, the US government does do body counts on the death of Iraqi civilians, you didn't see that trumpeted everywhere the way you did the lie about aluminum tubes, did you?

They haven't changed collectively. They know that the public has changed. The public has turned against the war. (And that happened last summer though a number of centrist columnists are trying to tell you it just happened. The shift was last summer and by November of last year, that shift was being reflected in the polling.) They're still waiting to see if the war can be repackaged and sold again to the American people.

It can't be. Short of another 9-11, and the hysteria that would surround it, the shift is set in stone. As they gradually wake up to that, they'll be forced to do a little bit more coverage that might actually aspire to reporting. Not much, but enough to make sure that they still have some sort of audience to justify their advertising rates.

In the leadup to the war, the nation got a lesson in whom big media elects to invite to the table and whom it doesn't. If you look closely, you'll see that, all this time after, not a great deal's changed. So don't fall for the lie that big media's woken up and is now committed to real journalism.

Hurricane Katrina proved that. Sure, people tried to make names for themselves. There was weeping on camera. But a year later and look at the state of New Orleans. Where was the coverage of that? Psuedo-outrage gets spouted for the anniversary but watch and see how quickly it vanishes.

Nothing's changed. That includes big media's desire for further deregulation. How any outlet that got it so wrong on the war can now argue that they need the ability to expand is beyond us? What's that argument like? "We were wrong in only print and the TV and/or radio station we own, but if you give us a chance to own everything, we'll be right!"

Know your enemy. They're still (collectively) the enemy. They're still trying to advocate while claiming they're informing. They're still shaping what's covered not for news value or to help comprehension but to sell you whatever it is they're selling on any given day.

You fought it in the lead up, you fought it in the early stages. Keep fighting it. We'll all need to to in order to bring the troops home.