"President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq...[as] part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses. "
And the military is no different. One example, reported by the The Washington Post in June 2006, noted that military "briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war."
One issue that the Inspector General report did not deal with is the media's role of enthusiastically turning to these military "experts" without disclosing their obvious conflicts of interest, as well as the mainstream media's incestuous relationship with the Pentagon. For example, former CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan proudly stated back in 2003 that:
"I think it's important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy behind the conflict. I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance --'At CNN, here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war' -- and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important."
Immediately after the New York Times Pulitzer-winning story was published the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which weekly monitors roughly 1,300 stories from 48 different media outlets, reported that that there were only two related pieces of coverage that came out after the New York Times broke the story, and both of them were on the April 24th broadcast of PBS NewsHour. The Pew Research Center reported, "In the cable news universe, where many of these analysts worked, silence greeted the story."
Yet the " military-industrial-media complex" is not only a threat domestically, it is a threat abroad--as the Iraq war illustrates with the more than 1 million Iraqis killed, scores of people tortured and the country's social service infrastructure in ruins.
This case of the U.S. government propagandizing its own people, and the media's failure to serve as an independent watchdog, further undermines America's democratic ideals. The world can't afford to wait any longer for rigorous investigations, debates and reforms surrounding these matters.
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