Progressive World Review

        Glenn Greenwald’s post today raises an interesting point regarding the media’s take on fair and balanced news coverage.  In it he examines a Charlie Rose broadcast that takes a look at the Iraq war on its fifth anniversary.  Specifically, Greenwald points out that the choices of interviewees, supposedly representing both sides of the issue, were in fact, all supporters of the war to one degree or another.

The two alleged “war critics” were the President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, Lesley Gelb, and The New Yorker’s George Packer. As Rose put it: “To get the other side’s perspective, I talked to Richard Perle and Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute.” And therein one finds a perfect expression of how limited, distorted and propagandistic the debate over Iraq in the establishment press continues to be. (emphasis original)

In no meaningful sense are Gelb and Packer on “the other side” from Perle and Kagan. Both Gelb and Packer were, albeit to different degrees, among the most influential enablers of the invasion of Iraq. (emphasis added)

I encourage you to read the entire article as Greenwald makes a compelling case against these two as “war critics”,

In February, 2003, Gelb went on Fox News with Brit Hume and attacked the French for impeding our invasion, telling Hume (via LEXIS): “But frankly, except for The Cuban Missile Crisis, I don’t think more has been at stake than today. Our country really is at risk in a way we’ve never been at risk before.” Three days before the invasion, he told The Associated Press: “I’m in favor of this . . . . It’s the best medicine for anti-Americanism around the world I can imagine.” To this day, Gelb continues to insist that the invasion was the right thing to do, but that we just should have executed it more effectively. So that’s one of Rose’s “war critics.”

While much more nuanced and cautious than Gelb, Packer was one of the intellectual leaders of the so-called “liberal hawk” movement. He wrote a highly influential December, 2002 New York Times article proclaiming “The Liberal Quandry over Iraq,” touting the views of so-called “liberal hawks.” The next month, he demanded “a clean break” with what he scorned as “doctrinaire leftists, who know what they think about American foreign policy — they’re against it,” and rejected “an antiwar movement with little to say to Americans’ fears for their own safety.” (emphasis original)

         My point here is that this is hardly an isolated case of the “liberal” media being in fact, far skewed to the right.  In fact, the whole notion of “fair and balanced” as practiced by the main-stream-media is fundamentally flawed.  What passes for “fair and balanced” starts with the perception of the two extremes, typically meaning the Democrats vs. Republicans, regardless of the fact that these two political parties hardly represent the full political continuum or even the middle of the political spectrum, and then continues on by triangulating a position in between them, assuming this must be the “reasonable” and “balanced” position.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the run up to the Iraq war.  The extremist, warmongering Republicans raced full steam ahead into Iraq while the timid Democrats, scared silly they’d be portrayed as weak on defense (predictably, they were anyway), didn’t lift a finger to stop them.  How is that supposed to be considered as “two opposing sides?”  How can you expect to find the truth if you’re only looking between dumb and dumber?

        As it stands now, the majority of Americans consider our involvement in Iraq to be a mistake, as in we shouldn’t have done this in the first place.  So it stands to “reason” that we should have listened far closer to those who warned us from the beginning that this was a mistake.  However, the media universally portrayed war opponents as Berkeley living, pot smoking, fringe lunatics not to be trusted with serious decisions like going to war.  This, as it turns out, was a complete fallacy as Greenwald demonstrates in his post,

There’s an ongoing myth, peddled by the pro-war establishment, that very few people with “serious” foreign policy credentials unequivocally opposed the invasion of Iraq. That just isn’t true. Here, for instance, is an anti-war ad signed (and paid for) by 33 scholars of international security affairs — from among the nation’s most prestigious academic institutions — which they published in The New York Times in September, 2002, presciently setting forth the case against the invasion.

Contrary to the portrayal by our “fair and balanced” news media, there has been, from the very beginning, serious arguments for not going to war but nobody listened.  Not the journalists, not the politicians, and certainly not the citizens of this country.

        As I mentioned before, it’s all about perceptions, but perceptions don’t always match reality.  And the perceived center rarely represents the truth.  It really should come as no surprise that a country that elects their leaders based on their perceived personalities rather than on demonstrated facts, should end up in the mess it’s in.

–Paul Wilden

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