democracyforcalifornia.com

BLIND TRUST

Last week the MSM pressed Congress to pass a Federal Shield law to protect their sources. In doing so they are asking the public for blind trust. Does the public not have the right to know the source of a story so that we can determine for ourselves if the source is credible? Should Americans have given the media their blind trust in a time of war?

Unfortunately, the public trusted the media when it shouldn't have. They were duped. In the lead up to war, Judith Miller wrote numerous articles in the New York Times about WMD based on bogus sources. All of her reports were believed; all of them proved false. Her unidentified source? The known felon and Pentagon stooge, Ahmed Chalabi, whose credibility was and is non-existent ("Chalabi has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper," Judith Miller wrote in an intra-office email to John Burns, the Times' Baghdad bureau chief). Those front page stories were used by Cheney, Bush, and Rice to further subtantiate their justifications for war. Had the public known at the time that her anonymous "Iraqi expatriot" was a man who had not set foot in Iraq since he was six years old, a man who was convicted of embezzlment in Jordan, and who plotted for over a decade to overthrow Saddam Hussein to advance his own political agenda, would the American public not have doubted the veracity of her reports and questioned the government's plan to invade Iraq? I think they would have.

Judith Miller, along with the war hawks in government and her media cohorts have the blood of thousands of Americans and Iraqis on their hands. Now they want to hide their complicity in these crimes behind a Federal Shield law that would undermine the prosecution's investigation into the Plame leak and set a legal precedent that would block any future federal investigations into the lies that led us to war. Moreover, a Federal Shield law would give the media carte blanche to launch vendettas against true whistleblowers like Joe Wilson, the real hero in all this.

Several weeks ago the Downingstreet Memos exposed a conspiracy to "fix the facts" around a pre-existing policy. Who of all the reporters "fixed" those facts more than Judith Miller? And yet somehow she's morphed from government shill into a martyr for a free press, with a self-aggrendizing MSM jumping on the bandwagon. Last week on Larry King Live, Bob Woodward of Watergate fame pretentiously offered to take Judith Miller's place in jail, in the service of a free press (as if the prosecutor would have any reason to take him up on the offer). Give me a break! Woodward of all people damn well knows the difference between a whistelblower like "Deep Throat," a "Curveball" and a Plame leaker.

Something stinks here. It is the stench of corrupt media hacks seeking a Federal Shield law to cover their tracks in the failure to report the truth about the Iraq war. Notice how they try to separate the "A" story from the "B" story -- the "A" story being their reports on WMD that led us to war, the "B" story being the investigation into the Plame leak. Very slick.

I believe that it should be my “right to know” who the source for a story is so that I can evaluate for myself the validity of that source. The use of anonymous sources in this war and in the previous Gulf War has been a propaganda boon for both the warhawks and the media war propaganda machine. A Federal Shield law would only encourage the media to flagrantly abuse their privlege to use unidentfied sources with impunity. This does not serve the public good, in fact it undermines it. Nor does it bode well for a free press: Free of lies, free of propaganda, and free of collusion with a corrupt government.

The public would be better served if the media followed the guidelines they were taught in Journalism 101 -- that is, provide at least three credible "named" sources and corroberative facts. Anything less is not journalism and it shouldn't take a blogger to set the "professionals" straight on that score.

Posted by Diana at July 26, 2005 06:41 AM