Operation Iraqi Infoganda

[Charlie]

I think Frank Rich from the NY Times really nails it here...

Somewhere else on this forum Daniel states that The NY Times often covers stories in a "useless" way...I think a better word would be "objective", or "unemotional." However, on the opinion pages, the writers usually shoot straight from the hip. I consider myself a liberal democrat, but also find it useful to read the neocons, like William Safire and Thomas Friedman, to see what makes them tick. Sorry, I digress..

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/arts/28RICH.html

FRANK RICH
Operation Iraqi Infoganda

Published: March 28, 2004

Real journalism may be reeling, but faux journalism rocks. As an entertainment category in the cultural marketplace, it may soon rival reality TV and porn. Television is increasingly awash in fake anchors delivering fake news, some of them far more trenchant than real anchors delivering real news. Even CNBC, a financial news network, is chasing after the success of Jon Stewart; its new nightly fake newscast, presided over by a formerly funny "Saturday Night Live" fake anchor, Dennis Miller, is being promoted with far more zeal than was ever lavished on CNBC's real "News With Brian Williams."

Turn on real news shows like "Dateline NBC" and "Larry King Live," meanwhile, and you're all too likely to find Jayson Blair, the lying former reporter of The New York Times, continuing to play a reporter on TV as he fabricates earnest blather about his concern for journalistic standards. Elsewhere on the dial you'll learn that a fake news show ("The Daily Show") has been in a booking war with a real news show ("Hardball") over who would first be able to interview the real (I think) Desmond Tutu. At such absurd moments, and they are countless these days in our 24/7 information miasma, real journalism and its evil twin merge into a mind-bending mutant that would defy a polygraph's ability to sort out the lies from the truth.

This phenomenon has been good news for the Bush administration, which has responded to the growing national appetite for fictionalized news by producing a steady supply of its own. Of late it has gone so far as to field its own pair of Jayson Blairs, hired at taxpayers' expense: Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia, the "reporters" who appeared in TV "news" videos distributed by the Department of Health and Human Services to local news shows around the country. The point of these spots — which were broadcast whole or in part as actual news by more than 50 stations in 40 states — was to hype the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit as an unalloyed Godsend to elderly voters. They are part of a year-plus p.r. campaign, which, with its $124 million budget, would dwarf in size most actual news organizations.

When one real reporter, Robert Pear of The Times, blew the whistle on these TV "news" stories this month, a government spokesman defended them with pure Orwell-speak: "Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information tools." The government also informed us that Ms. Ryan was no impostor but an actual "freelance journalist." The Columbia Journalism Review, investigating further, found that Ms. Ryan's past assignments included serving as a TV shill for pharmaceutical companies in infomercials plugging FluMist and Excedrin. Given that drug companies may also be the principal beneficiaries of the new Medicare law, she is nothing if not consistent in her journalistic patrons. But she is a freelance reporter only in the sense that Mike Ditka would qualify as one when appearing in Levitra ads.

As for the mystery of Alberto Garcia's journalistic bonafides, it remains at this writing unresolved. His reporting career has not left a trace on any data bank. Perhaps he is the creation of Stephen Glass, the serial fantasist who once ruled the pages of The New Republic.

Back at Comedy Central, Jon Stewart was ambivalent about the government's foray into his own specialty, musing aloud about whether he should be outraged or flattered. One of his faux correspondents, though, was outright faux despondent. "They created a whole new category of fake news — infoganda," Rob Corddry said. "We'll never be able to keep up!" But Mr. Corddry's joke is not really a joke. The more real journalism declines, the easier it is for such government infoganda to fill the vacuum.

George W. Bush tries to facilitate this process by shutting out the real news media as much as possible. By the start of this year, he had held only 11 solo press conferences, as opposed to his father's count of 71 by the same point in his presidency. (Even the criminally secretive Richard Nixon had held 23.) Mr. Bush has declared that he rarely reads newspapers and that he prefers to "go over the heads of the filter" — as he calls the news media — and "speak directly to the people." To this end, he gave a series of interviews to regional broadcasters last fall — a holding action, no doubt, until Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia could be hired to fill that role. When the president made a rare exception last month and took questions from an actual front-line journalist, NBC's Tim Russert, his performance was so maladroit that the experiment is unlikely to be repeated anytime too soon.

There's no point in bothering with actual news people anyway, when you can make up your own story and make it stick, whatever the filter might have to say about it. No fake news story has become more embedded in our culture than the administration's account of its actions on 9/11. As The Wall Street Journal reported on its front page this week — just as the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was going public with his parallel account — many of this story's most familiar details are utter fiction. Mr. Bush's repeated claim that one of his "first acts" of that morning was to put the military on alert is false. So are the president's claims that he watched the first airplane hit the World Trade Center on TV that morning. (No such video yet existed.) Nor was Air Force One under threat as Mr. Bush flew around the country, delaying his return to Washington.

Yet the fake narrative of 9/11 has been scrupulously maintained by the White House for more than two years. Although the administration has tried at every juncture to stonewall the 9/11 investigative commission, its personnel, including the president, had all the time in the world for the producer of a TV movie, Showtime's "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis." The result was a scenario that further rewrote the history of that day, stirring steroids into false tales of presidential derring-do. Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, characterized one of the movie's many elisions in Salon. To show the president continuing to sit and read with elementary school kids "while people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center towers," she wrote, "would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and grand vision."

To shore up the Rove version of 9/11 once Richard Clarke went public with his alternative tale on last Sunday's "60 Minutes," the White House placed Condoleezza Rice on all five morning news shows the next day. The administration is confident that it can reinstate its bogus scenario — particularly given that Ms. Rice, unlike Mr. Clarke, is refusing to take the risk of reciting it under oath to the 9/11 commission.

After 9/11, similar fake-news techniques helped speed us into "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The run-up to the war was falsified by a barrage of those "modern public information tools," including 16 words of Tom Clancy-style fiction in the State of the Union. John Burns of The Times, speaking by phone from Iraq to a postmortem on war coverage sponsored by the University of California journalism school in Berkeley this month, said of the real press back then: "We failed the American public by being insufficiently critical about elements of the administration's plan to go to war." What few journalistic efforts were made to penetrate the trumped-up rationales for war were easily defeated by the administration's false news reports of impending biological attacks and mushroom clouds. To see how the faux journalism sausage was made, go to www.reform.house.gov/min, (http://www.reform.house.gov/min,) where a searchable database posted by Representative Henry Waxman identifies "237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell and National Security Adviser Rice in 125 separate public appearances."

Once the war began, the Defense Department turned a warehouse in Qatar into a TV studio, where it installed a $250,000 Central Command briefing stage, shipped from Chicago by FedEx for an additional $47,000. The set was lent authority by a real-news set designer, whose previous credits included ABC's "World News Tonight" and "Good Morning America." As for the embedded journalists who filled in the rest of the story, a candid assessment was delivered by Lt. Col. Rick Long, the former head of media relations for the Marine Corps, also speaking at Berkeley 10 days ago: "Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment. . . . Overall, we were very happy with the outcome."

The "news" of the war included its fictionalized Rambo, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, and its fictionalized conclusion, the "Mission Accomplished" celebration led by the president on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. (Mr. Bush said that the premature victory banner was the handiwork of the ship's crew when in fact it was the product of the White House scenic shop.) But for all that fake news, we still don't know such real news as how many Iraqi civilians were killed as we gave them their freedom. We are still shielded from images of American casualties, before or after they are placed in coffins.

Now that the breakdown in pre-9/11 security is threatening to dominate the real news, the administration is working overtime to overwhelm it with its latest, thematically related fake story line. Time magazine reports that employees of the Department of Homeland Security have been given the goal of providing the president "with one homeland-security photo-op a month." The Associated Press reports that the department is also hiring a "liaison to the entertainment industry" — with a salary as high as $136,000, plus benefits — "to make sure that dramatic portrayals of it are as accurate as possible." (The deadline for applications, do note, is tomorrow.) Of course "accurate" in that job description should be read as "inaccurate," since the liaison's real task, like that of the intrepid reporter Karen Ryan, will be to make sure that any actual news of our homeland security's many holes is kept on the q.t. According to E! entertainment news, we can even expect a new TV show, "D.H.S. — the Series," to which both Mr. Bush and Tom Ridge will contribute endorsements and sound bites.

When it comes to homeland security, you can be sure that the administration's faux news will always be good news — though this is the one story in which the real news can sometimes become just too intrusive to ignore

[sidecross]

The Frank Rich piece was quite good. The Op-Ed piece the other day in the NYT by Peter R. Neuman was quite good too.

Op-Ed Contributor: Why Nobody Saw 9/11 Coming

March 27, 2004
By PETER R. NEUMAN

LONDON - Did the Bush administration, before the 9/11
attacks, fail to take terrorism seriously enough? At first
the contention seems unlikely. Isn't this the most hawkish
administration in living memory? Wasn't it President Bush
who coined the phrase "war on terror"?

Yet in the current hearings on the attacks - and in the
controversy surrounding the new book by Richard A. Clarke,
the administration's first counterterrorism chief - the
words "neglect" and "failure" keep cropping up.

And there is something to these accusations - although
perhaps not in the sense that the people making them
intend. The administration's early failures on terrorism
cannot be pinned down to individual instances of "neglect."
To understand what really went wrong, we need to go back to
the last decades of the cold war, when people like
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Vice
President Dick Cheney first started to make sense of
terrorism.

In the 1970's and 80's, the predominant view among
Washington hawks was that none of the various terrorist
groups that operated in Western Europe and the Middle East
was truly independent. They were all connected through a
vast terrorist network, which was created and supported by
the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. The
Communists' aim, the hawks believed, was to destabilize the
Western societies without being directly linked to
violence.

It all seemed to make perfect sense, and books like "The
Terror Network" by Claire Sterling, which argued the
network hypothesis with considerable force and conviction,
became essential reading for anyone who wanted to make his
way in the Reagan White House.

The idea that the sinister hand of the Kremlin was behind
groups like the Italian Red Brigades and even the Irish
Republican Army revealed the deep sense of paranoia within
political circles at the time. More important, the idea of
the Communist terrorism network buttressed the conservative
fixation on states as the only major actors in the
international political system.

According to the classically "realist" mindset, only states
can pose a significant threat to the national security of
other states, because lesser actors simply do not have the
capacity, sophistication and resources to do so. Hence, if
terrorists suddenly became effective in destabilizing
countries like Italy, they couldn't possibly have acted on
their own. They must have had state sponsors, and it was
only by tackling the state sponsors (in this case, the
Soviet bloc), that you could root out the terrorists.

During the cold war, the paradigm of "state-sponsored
terrorism" was useful, if not entirely correct. Most
terrorists did receive help from states, and there were
some links between disparate groups, although not to the
extent that many in the United States believed. And some of
the worst atrocities - like the 1983 attack on United
States military headquarters in Beirut - were in fact
carried out by groups that had been created by "rogue
states" like Iran, Libya and Syria.

With the end of the cold war, however, things changed.
While there was no longer a prime state sponsor for any
"terror network," there was also no longer any need for
one. It became easy to travel from one country to another.
Money could be collected and transferred around the globe.
Cell phones and the Internet made it possible to maintain
tight control of an elusive group that could move its
"headquarters" across continents. In fact, by the end of
the decade, it seemed as if the model of state-sponsored
terrorism had effectively been reversed: Al Qaeda was now
in charge of a state - Afghanistan under the Taliban -
rather than vice versa.

But the Washington hawks failed to see what was happening.
The world around them had changed, but their paradigm
hadn't. For them, states continued to be the only real
movers and shakers in the international system, and any
serious "strategic" threat to America's security could only
come from an established nation.

Consider an article in the January/February 2000 issue of
Foreign Affairs magazine by Condoleezza Rice, titled
"Campaign 2000 - Promoting the National Interest." Ms.
Rice, spelling out the foreign policy priorities of a Bush
White House, argued that after years of drift under the
Clinton administration, United States foreign policy had to
concentrate on the "real challenges" to American security.
This included renewing "strong and intimate relationships"
with allies, and focusing on "big powers, particularly
Russia and China." In Ms. Rice's view, the threat of
non-state terrorism was a secondary problem - in her to do
list" it was under the category of "rogue regimes," to be
tackled best by dealing "decisively with the threat of
hostile powers."

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that there was
relatively little interest in Al Qaeda when the Bush team
took over. For most of 2001, the national security agenda
really consisted of only two items, neither of which had
anything to do with the terrorist threat of radical Islam.
First, the administration increased its efforts to bring
about regime change in Iraq, which was believed to be the
prime source of instability in a region of great strategic
importance.

The second goal was a more competitive stance toward China.
Missile defense - this time against attack by China and
North Korea - was put back on the table. Even the collision
of an American spy plane with a Chinese fighter in 2001 is
an indication of the administration's mindset -
intelligence resources were deployed not to find Osama bin
Laden, but to monitor what many White House hawks
considered the most likely future challenger of American
power.

Sept. 11, 2001, brought about a quick re-orientation of
foreign policy. What didn't change, however, was the
state-centered mindset of the people who were in charge.
According to Mr. Clarke, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld immediately suspected Saddam Hussein, and
suggested military strikes against Iraq. While cooler heads
prevailed at the time, and there was a real effort to track
down and destroy the Qaeda network, there was also a
reluctance to abandon the idea that terrorism had to be
state-based. Hence the administration's insistence that
there must be an "axis of evil" - a group of states
critical in sustaining the terrorists. It was an attempt to
reconcile the new, confusing reality with long-established
paradigm of state sponsorship.

In the end, the 9/11 hearings are likely to find that the
intelligence failure that led to the horrific attacks
stemmed from the longstanding problems of wrongly placed
agents, failed communications between government
departments and lack of resources. But it was also a
failure of vision - one for which the current
administration must take responsibility.

Peter R. Neumann is a research fellow in international
terrorism at the Department of War Studies, King's College
London.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/27/opinion/27NEUM.html?ex=1081404553&ei=1&en=68decbc02f511dc6