“The right questions were asked. I think there’s a lot of critics — and I guess we can count Scott McClellan as one — who thinks that, if we did not debate the president, debate the policy in our role as journalists, if we did not stand up and say, this is bogus, and you’re a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn’t do our job. And I respectfully disagree.”
That same day on the Today Show, Brian Williams:
“I’ve always put it this way. In Katrina, the evidence was right next to us. Sadly, we saw fellow Americans, in some cases, floating past face down. We knew what had just happened. We weren’t allowed that kind of proximity with the weapons inspectors. I was in Kuwait for the buildup of the war. And yes, we heard from the Pentagon on my cell phone the minute they heard us report something that they didn’t like. The tone of that time was quite extraordinary”.
But it’s just plain false to suggest that they had no idea what the weapons inspectors knew or that there was evidence to support not going to war. Anyone who continues to say this is ignoring the fact that they did not do their job and that they are continuing to not do their job faithfully.
Perhaps this is why, as Naomi Klein hints at, we have seen this idea perpetuated by the news media that war does not sell.
The news media has not needed proof to support this claim either. All it has needed is something else to cover. And the elections have been their savior because punditry knows no boundaries when it comes to election talk.
We the people cannot accept war does not sell. For lack of proof and for the preservation of this country, we cannot. For future Tomas’ who will unfortunately return home broken and battered, we cannot. For the next million Iraqis that will die if we do not act, we cannot.
Naomi Klein highlighted the worst of the media blackout, the IVAW Winter Soldier Investigation:
The disappearance, of the Winter Soldier was such a graphic example. Many of us did see those images on Democracy Now! And online. They were media friendly. It’s very interesting when a Iraq vet admits to having participated in war crimes, rips off his medals, and throws them into the crowd. So, Iraq is being willfully being disappeared and it is certainly very hard to cover because it is such a disaster but there is a lack of transparency even in that. We’re not hearing from the networks, from cable news, that they actually can’t cover this occupation for fear of their lives so they stand on balconies, their hotels inside the Green Zone. Especially since we have al-Jazeera being blocked in this country in English language from access on cable.
That media blackout and the continuing media blackout perpetuating the idea that “war does not sell” is why trailblazers like Amy Goodman had this to say from the panel:
We have to build our own media. Public access TV, public radio, community radio, public television, the Internet, we have to join it together. And it is a mighty force all over this country, which is why they are trying to privatize it or get rid of it. Don’t make no mistake about it. We have to challenge the corporate media because it’s not just public media that’s using the public airwaves. NBC, ABC, CBS --- they are using our property too. It is not private property.
She went on to describe the most damning evidence against journalists so far in regards to this war--- a FAIR study published in March of 2003 that stated the following: “Sources affiliated with anti-war activism were nearly non-existent. On the four networks combined, just three of 393 sources were identified as being affiliated with anti-war activism-- less than 1 percent.”
For lack of representation of diverse views, we cannot sit back any longer.
As Donahue said on the panel, "the next time somebody tells us to shut up and sing, we want to tell them that we send thousands of young Americans to fight and die in foreign battlefields and fight and die for our way life. And the center of our way of life is free speech, and if we’re not gonna use it, than stop wasting their blood. We’ll get us a neo-Mussolini who’ll tell us what’s good. We can have any kind of country we want. It’s up to us."
We are seeing the “war does not sell” media now make the case for Democrats that “impeachment does not sell.”
Our media should not be allowed to subvert democracy any longer. It’s not we the media that decides. It’s we the people that decides.
Let us not sanitize the images of the war. We must see the images until this war ends.
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