the "liberal media"

[mtn_mouse]

liberal vs. conservative

[Ratboy]

Speaking of liberal radio, I hear that the new "Air America" is having trouble making their payroll, has breached contracts with affiliates, and listenership is abysmal.

 

Please cite sources. (Pref. not "freerepublic", "crosswalk", "onion", etc.)

[JayB]

"how many major news outlet were critical of the wmd justification, while progressives were crying foul from the get go?"

 

Maybe one in 10,000 - because this was the consensus opinion of every major intelligence agency in the world, there were major stocks unaccounted for, and the regime's conduct gave every reason to believe that they were engaged in an effort to conceal them. This is the reason that no one involved the movement(s) that would have left Saddam in power was going to stake their argument on this issue.

 

An honest appraisal of the arguments set forth for leaving Saddam in power centered around the argument that the US and England were intent on seizing Iraqi oil by force as doing so would result in a net economic gain for both, and that any attempts to remove Hussein would immediately result in tens of thousands of civilian casualties, mass-starvation, etc. Any attempt to claim otherwise is simply not credible.

[j_b]

that's just plain not true.

 

every single claim about wmd's was countered prior going to war. some progressives left open the possibility that saddam may have had some wmd left from pre-1991, but they certainly pointed out that the case for wmd as presented by the administration or blair's was simply not credible prior to invasion.

 

as for intelligence agencies, it's just not true that all agencies said saddam was actively pursuing wmd and it represented an imminent threat. it has been well established that the administration cherrypicked info that suported its intent even though the sources were often not credible (i.e. chalabi and other iraqi defectors that were discredited with our intelligence agencies)

see famous sy hersh article: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact

 

 

Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction

 

Speaker: Powell, Colin - Secretary of State

 

Date: 2/5/2003

 

Quote/Claim:

"We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails." [source: DOS Web site]

 

Fact:

The key defector "failed a second polygraph test and in May 2002, intelligence agencies were warned that the information was unreliable." - Telegraph, 2/19/04

 

Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction

 

Speaker: Bush, George - President

 

Date: 2/8/2004

 

Quote/Claim:

"I expected to find the weapons [because] I based my decision on the best intelligence possible...The evidence I had was the best possible evidence that he had a weapon." [source: Meet the Press transcript]

 

Fact:

"Zero tons [of chemical weapons], or close to it, was always a strong possibility in the eyes of experts who knew the record of U.N. inspections. But Bush administration officials, in their overtures to war, never acknowledged it." - Boston Globe

 

 

Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction

 

Speaker: Bush, George - President

 

Date: 2/8/2004

 

Quote/Claim:

"We looked at the intelligence." [source: Meet the Press transcript]

 

Fact:

Knight Ridder reported that CIA officers "said President Bush ignored warnings" that his WMD case was weak. And Greg Thielmann, the Bush State Department's top intelligence official, "said suspicions were presented as fact, and contrary arguments ignored." Knight Ridder later reported, "Senior diplomatic, intelligence and military officials have charged that Bush and his top aides made assertions about Iraq's banned weapons programs and alleged links to al-Qaeda that weren't supported by credible intelligence, and that they ignored intelligence that didn't support their policies." - Knight-Ridder, 6/13/03, 6/28/03; CBS News, 6/7/03

 

 

Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction

 

Speaker: Bush, George - President

 

Date: 2/8/2004

 

Quote/Claim:

"The international community thought he had weapons." [source: Meet the Press transcript]

 

Fact:

The international community told the White House that it could not verify the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The IAEA and U.N. both repeatedly told the Administration it had no evidence that Iraq possessed WMD. On 2/15/03, the IAEA said, "We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq." On 3/7/03 IAEA Director Mohamed El Baradei said nuclear experts had found "no indication" that Iraq has tried to import high-strength aluminum tubes for centrifuge enrichment of uranium. At the same time, AP reported, "U.N. weapons inspectors have not found any 'smoking guns' in Iraq during their search for weapons WMD." AP also reported, "U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said his teams have not uncovered any WMD." - U.S. State Department, 2/14/03; NY Times, 3/7/03; AP, 1/9/03, 2/14/03

 

 

Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction

 

Speaker: Bush, George - President

 

Date: 2/8/2004

 

Quote/Claim:

"I expected to find the weapons [because] I based my decision on the best intelligence possible...The evidence I had was the best possible evidence that he had a weapon." [source: Meet the Press transcript]

 

Fact:

The White House was repeatedly warned by the intelligence community about the imprecision of intelligence on WMD's. The day before the President appeared on Meet The Press, The Washington Post reported, "President Bush and his top advisers ignored many of the caveats and qualifiers included in the classified report on Saddam Hussein's weapons." Specifically, the President made unequivocal statements that Iraq "has got chemical weapons" two months after the DIA concluded that there was "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons." He said, "Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production" three months after the White House received an intelligence report that clearly indicated Department of Energy experts concluded the tubes were not intended to produce uranium enrichment centrifuges. He said, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," three months after "the CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about" the claim. - Washington Post, 2/7/04; Bush statement, 11/3/02; DIA report, 2002; Bush statement, 1/28/03; NIE, October, 2002; WP, 7/23/03; Bush statement, 10/7/02; WP, 9/26/03

 

 

Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction

 

Speaker: Cheney, Dick - Vice President

 

Date: 1/9/2004

 

Quote/Claim:

"[T]he reporting that we had prior to the war this time around was all consistent with that -- basically said that he had a chemical, biological and nuclear program, and estimated that if he could acquire fissile material, he could have a nuclear weapon within a year or two." [source: Waxman Database]

 

Fact:

"There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons or where Iraq has -- or will -- establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities." - Defense Intelligence Agency, 2002

 

Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction

 

Speaker: Bush, George - President

 

Date: 10/7/2002

 

Quote/Claim:

"Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." [source: White House Web site]

 

Fact:

"French intelligence was telling us that there was effectively no real evidence of a WMD programme. That's why France wanted a longer extension on the weapons inspections. The French, the Germans and the Russians all knew there were no weapons there -- and so did Blair and Bush as that's what the French told them directly. Blair ignored what the French told us and instead listened to the Americans." - British Intelligence Agent, Sunday herald, 6/1/03

 

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/apps/custom/cap/findorg.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=45294

 

do you need more? because there is plenty where the above came from ...

[j_b]

Does j_b really believe that 65% of America is left-leaning?

 

i said ~65% had a liberal perspective on social issues. from health care to environment, >50% to 80% americans, according to most polls, show a long-standing liberal point of view. even people like pp, have a liberal perpective on some social issues. you, in turn, may not but it says more about you than anything else.

 

BTW; I like NPR, but if you believe it is center, or right-of, you'd better check and see just how far to the left you have drifted!

 

thank you for providing your opinion on this. unfortunately, it is not substantiated by data. unsupported opinions, whether yours or mine on this topic are not really relevant, neither is the opinion of right-wing talking heads who don't substantiate their pov with more than anecdotal evidence.

[JayB]

Not what the people were chanting on the street, kemosabe.

 

A few articles does not equal a mass movement.

 

Doubts about WMD are not what animated opposition to the war. End of story.

[rbw1966]

Ok, I'll bite. What did animate the opposition to the war?

[iain]

I was about to say the same thing. Seems there was quite a row about WMD as I remember.

[Jim]

Just goes to show how 99% of the media are sheep. They just spit out the material they are spoon-fed by government spokespersons without critical analysis. In the early days of the PR campaign there were a number of foreign press reports and US progressive media that were screaming lies! lies! But most folks never got any word of it through the media cheerleading.

 

So the other day we have the NY Time editorial board apologizing for not doing a critical analysis of the WMD PR. They were marching in the same parade as the rest of them. Yea, liberal media.

[johndavidjr]

Yet most people here seem fairly well-informed on current affairs-- despite failings of stupid TV radio & press.

[olyclimber]

Yet most people here seem fairly well-informed on current affairs-- despite failings of stupid TV radio & press.

That is because they get the facts from this board. Consider yourself lucky to know about this site!

[j_b]

juicy run down of how the nyt drummed up support for war:

 

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/05/27/times/index.html

 

"When the full history of the Iraq war is written, one of its most scandalous chapters will be about how American journalists, in particular those at the New York Times, so easily allowed themselves to be manipulated by both dubious sources and untrustworthy White House officials into running stories that misled the nation about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."

[JayB]

You are asking the wrong person about what motivated opposition to the war, but the general vibe emmanating from the "Potlucks for Peace" crew and their soulmates on the board here seemed to be that it was purely a strategic gambit to get our hands on Iraq's oil, and that the said gambit would result in the anhiliation of 10s of thousands of Iraqis during the offensive. The consensus also seemed to be that taking a round of inspections followed by ? (you tell me) would be the best way to insure that Hussein and co were deprived of any current stock of WMD in the present and denied access to them in the future.

 

A related theme that seems to have emerged in the wake of the war is that because we found no WMD, any talk about the risks posed by terrorist groups like Al-Queda and their ilk working in conjunction with rogue states was, is, and always will be nothing more than a neocon tactic to enlist support for their agenda.

 

Should this conclusion ever become the operating consensus that governs the behavior of future governments, I suspect that the world will have the opportunity to lament such blindness. This will be especially true if Iraq implodes while the rest of the world does nothing to avert such an outcome.

[chucK]

still employing the mud-people strawman eh JayB?

 

Seems to me what really animated the opposition to this war was those damn pictures. If we just heard stories about our guys torturing those we are liberating this would have never happened. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that now "3 US Marines Dead" has become such commonplace that it is not even the top story anymore. Or maybe it has to do with the fact that a line of former generals are coming out of the woodwork to lambaste (in hindsight) a stupid policy with no chance of winning. Or maybe it has to do with the fact that we are dropping the ball on our fight about terrorism because we have our hands totally full trying not to get our asses handed to us on a platter in Iraq. Maybe it's because people are getting the message that ordinary US average Joes are beginning to have to sacrifice for this war, not just the coalition of the willing; that is, those that volunteered to be in the army reserve. Maybe the weight of lie upon lie upon lie is starting to knock down the Bush whitehouse of cards. Maybe some of this stuff is what is animating opposition to the war. Maybe it's not just those stupid no more blood for Patchouli Oil braindeadheads?

 

Check out www.pollingreport.com. See how many people are enjoying this Iraq war. There sure must be more hippies-for-terrorism out there than I thought! Amazing.

[JayB]

That's a nice synopsis about the reasons people currently oppose the occupation of Iraq - but I was talking about why people opposed the war - as in before it commenced - rather than why people currently object to our presence there.

 

It is clear to anyone who honestly appraises the arguments employed by those who opposed removing Hussein by force prior to the invastion, that the current problems to claim vindiction for an opposition that was based on an entirely different set of arguments. Very few people based their opposition to the war on the grounds that Hussein had no WMD. Didn't see many "Take Saddam's Word for it! There are no WMD in Iraq!" placards on display at the marches, or dangling from the overpasses on Highway 99.

 

The arguments were "No Blood for Oil," the "Dark Cabal of Texas Oilmen" subverting the world's democracies for their own benefit theory (a personal favorite, no?), the tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties that would be a direct result of the offensive, etc, etc, etc - none of which has been validated by events there.

 

Per the current opposition - there's a bunch of nice sentiment there - but I am left wondering how people who hold those sentiments would translate them into any constructive measures on the ground, and how any of them would benefit the Iraqis, whose welfare was -ironically enough - one of the reasons why people supposedly opposed overthrowing Saddam by force. The fact that the welfare of the Iraqi people had nothing whatsoever to do with opposition to the war has been laid bare by the anti-occupation crowds desire to withdraw our forces without any consideration whatsoever on the impact that this would have upon the Iraqis themselves. My prediction is that such a move would lead inexorably to a massive civil war, the implosion of the Iraqi state, and widespread instability in the ME that would generate casualties at least two orders of magnitude greater than those sustained during the war and the subsequent occupation. I am at a loss to understand how advocating the wholesale abandonment of Iraq to its fate constitutes the moral position here.

[willstrickland]

I'll take a slightly different view JayB. The "oil war" contingent was certainly visible in the form of protests and news coverage, but I heard another reason for opposition quite often prior to commencement. I heard this reason from policy wonks and retired military officers alike.

 

The reason was "why rush this?". The weather (impending summer in the desert) was a big reason for the rush, and valid in many respects. I personally don't think waiting 6 months would have harmed the effort. This rushed march to war precluded developing an adequate plan for post-conflict Iraq. It also precluded garnering more international support. The "coalition" is nothing more than a token pledge of allgiance to the US and Britain by a few small players.

 

We have been reaping the seeds sown in that rush ever since Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" in his flight-suit swagger stunt. I don't know the latest numbers, but I believe more servicemen have been killed since the end of "major combat operations" than were killed during those combat operations.

 

It all speaks to an arrogance of the administration. IMO, you can lay that blame squarely on Wolfowitz and Cheney. Wolfowitz was writing as early as 1992 arguing for a pre-emptive doctrine. In 1998 Wolfy and Rummy (along with Perle, Armitage, William Bennett, Bill Kristol, and about 10 other neocons associated with the Project for a new American Century) sent a letter to Clinton....I give you a quote:

 

"The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy."(emphasis added).

 

Notably, Colin Powell and Condi Rice were arguing a different tact after this letter. To wit:

 

Powell - "Containment has been a successful policy, and I think we should make sure that we continue it until such time as Saddam Hussein comes into compliance with the agreements he made at the end of the (Gulf) war."

 

Rice - "The first line of defense, should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence—if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration."

 

Cheney's arrogance and sheer miscalcualtion is evident in this statement made shortly before commencement of operations: "As for the reaction of the Arab "street," the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are "sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans." Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced, just as it was following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991."

 

There were alot of people, myself included, who thought this was a very poor idea because there was no rush. If we had all this primo intelligence that Powell produced in the Dog and Pony show at the UN, and we were going to strike, why would we not hit those specific targets from afar and continue the containment policy, focusing our resources on actual homeland security and attacking terrorist camps etc such as in the border region of Pakistan/Afgahnistan?

 

The rabid lefties will latch onto the latest, greatest reason that best makes their ultimate case. Just because they are the most visible element of the anti-war camp doesn't mean others didn't oppose this clusterfuck on legitimate grounds from the get-go.

[scott_harpell]

...more fuel to the fire.

 

google media bias liberal: 318,000

 

google media bias conservative: 294,000

 

Preeeeeety close.

[rbw1966]

I disagree with JayB. I recall many political pundits criticizing the push towards war--before the invasion--citing the lack of evidence of WMD and the lack of multi-lateral support. The anti-war effort was not solely focused on the "blood for oil" dogma.

[Ratboy]

My opposition to the war before it happened was simple: Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. We should have stayed focused on Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. If we put these kind of resources into that, we'd have that bastard by now.

[j_b]

classic attempt at rewriting history! from very early on, nobody in the antiwar camp believed iraq was an imminent threat due to a wmd program. some people left open the possibility that some banned weapons were being built or left over from years ago but the administration never had any credibility on this topic as it was obvious they had decided to invade no matter what. furthermore most every piece of evidence provided by the administration during the build up was debunked within a matter of weeks if not days. as an example that most will remember, powell presentation at the un was widely laughed at since it was largely based on data that had been shown to be untrue or hot air. as the build up progressed, un inspections weren't finding anything even though they were supposedly acting on us intel ("we know where they are") and the entire un fiasco showed that bush never had any other intention but to invade.

 

let me also point out for the nth time that not trusting your governement isn't equivalent to trusting the enemy. don't tell me that someone supposedly as smart as jayb does not understand the gross faulty logic behind his diatribe. but conservatives like him have made extensive use of classic jingoist rhetoric to intimidate war opponents and it points to their willingness to suppress dissent by any means necessary including that of curtailing speech ("you are either with us or against us"). nothing new here but it largely explains how so many people were intimitated into supporting this war.

 

anyhow none of this is relevant to my initial point. nobody here claimed that the wmd fiasco was the only reason for opposing the war, it was just an example of how the supposed liberal media behaved when the chips came down even though there was plenty of evidence discreting the wmd scare from very early on. opposing the war on the basis of lack of serious evidence for wmd was certainly reason enough, but they were many other reasons to disagree. the humanitarian aspect and obvious geostrategic motives being only a couple of them. none are mutually exclusive.

[Crux]

BTW; I like NPR, but if you believe it is center, or right-of, you'd better check and see just how far to the left you have drifted!

"On the contrary," one might say, "By how far you think NPR is to the left of center, you can tell how far to the right you have drifted."