Demonize, Disguise, Divert

Maybe I should lay off this story a bit, but I thought Robert Jensen and Pat Youngblood put it well when they concluded their piece on the Newsweek scandal thusly:

...why the focus on the Newsweek story? It's part of the tried-and-true strategy of demonize, disguise, and divert. Demonize the news media to disguise the real causes of the resistance to occupation and divert attention from failed U.S. policies.

The irony is that the U.S. corporate news media deserve harsh criticism for coverage of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- not for possibly getting one fact wrong, but for failing to consistently challenge the illegality of both wars and the various distortions and lies that the Bush administration has used to mobilize support for those illegal wars.

We should hold the news media accountable when they fail. But we should defend journalists when they are used by political partisans who are eager to obscure their own failures.

I also thought this comment from Bill Van Auken was rich:

A Defense Department spokesman, Brian Whitman, denounced the Newsweek report Sunday as “irresponsible” and “demonstratively false.” He said the magazine “hid behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not stand scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage that they have done to this nation or those who were viciously attacked by these false allegations.”

The Pentagon’s chief spokesman Lawrence Di Rita went further, declaring, “They printed a story based on an erroneous source or sources that was demonstrably wrong and that resulted in riots in which people were killed.”

The White House weighed in as well on Monday. “The report has had serious consequences,” spokesman Scott McClellan said. “People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged.”

He went on to criticize the magazine for failing to retract the story and failing to live up to a “certain journalistic standard.” This from an administration whose “standards” include relentlessly planting false stories in the media, covertly paying columnists to promote its policies and passing off government-funded propaganda as news.