Kakistocracy

Jeff Cohen founded the media critic group FAIR, and for a brief while before the Iraq war produced the Phil Donohue Show on MSNBC. That network is a sleek and graceful wood duck among mallards that has recently been hiring liberals, notably Rachel Maddow, to host its commentary shows. Donahue was its highest rated show at the time he was canceled in 2003.

Cohen was inside the belly of the beast during the propaganda campaign before the war, and offers some unique insight. His essay, We Were Silenced by the Drums of War, was written in December of 2006, but it’s always good to revisit. Very few liberals get to see the inside of the propaganda machine as it is operating at full throttle.

It was excruciating to be silenced while myth and misinformation went unchallenged. Military analysts typically appeared unopposed; they were presented as experts, not advocates. But their closeness to the Pentagon often obstructed independent, skeptical analysis.

In November of 2002, UN Weapons inspector Hans Blix was sent back into Iraq after a four year absence (the UN had pulled inspectors out before Clinton’s attack in 1998. Official truth: Saddam kicked them out.). Blix was a voice in the wilderness, one of just a few telling the American public the truth – there were no weapons.

[MSNBC pre-war news show] Countdown: Iraq’s host asked an MSNBC military analyst, “What’s the buzz from the Pentagon about Hans Blix?” The retired colonel declared that Blix was considered “something like the Inspector Clousseau of the weapons of mass destruction inspection program … who will only remember the last thing he was told – and that he’s very malleable.”

Malleable is too nice a word for propagandists, as they know quite well what they are up to. There was even a little time for personal commerce, as General Barry McCaffrey, Clinton’s “drug czar”, said on-air “Thank God for the Abrams tank and Bradley fighting vehicle.” He was on the board of directors for the company making those vehicles. There is no low-bar in this business.

As the war began, CNN news president Eason Jordan admitted that his network’s military analysts were government-approved:

“I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started. I met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war. And we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important.”

Others (notably Michael Massing: Now They Tell Us) have noted that media coverage of the lead-up to war, bad as it was, got even worse in November of 2002…

Management favored experts who backed the Bush view – and hired several of them as paid analysts. Networks that normally cherished shouting matches were opting for discussions of harmonious unanimity. This made for dull, predictable TV. It also helped lead our nation to war, based on false premises.

Print journalism was equally guilty, says Massing.

A survey of the coverage in November, December, and January reveals relatively few articles about the debate inside the intelligence community. Those articles that did run tended to appear on the inside pages. Most investigative energy was directed at stories that supported, rather than challenged, the administration’s case.

Says Cohen:

As war neared, MSNBC Suits turned the screws even tighter on “Donahue.” They decreed that if we booked one guest who was anti-war on Iraq, we needed two who were pro-war. If we booked two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. At one staff meeting, a producer proposed booking Michael Moore and was told she’d need three right-wingers for political balance.

I thought about proposing Noam Chomsky as a guest, but our stage couldn’t accommodate the 28 right-wingers we would have needed for balance.

So that’s why Chomsky never makes the news channels! The studios aren’t big enough to hold the necessary right wing counterbalance.

American news coverage is, aside from that of outright despotic countries like North Korea, the worst, the most slavish and groveling on the planet. It is, as Cohen notes elsewhere, a “kakistocracy”, a real word meaning rule by the worst. In American media, there is no punishment for being wrong, so long as you are submissive. You can be bad, slavish, and stupid, but if you toe the line, your face will grace the screen.

Not every weapons expert had been wrong. Take ex-Marine and former UN inspector Scott Ritter. In the last months of 2002, he told any audience or journalist who would hear him that Iraqi WMDs represented no threat to our country. “Send in the inspectors,” urged Ritter. “Don’t send in the Marines.”

It’s telling that in the run-up to the war, no American TV network hired any on-air analysts from among the experts who questioned White House WMD claims. None would hire Ritter.

Said Russian General Alexander Lebed in the wake of the September, 1996 Clinton attack on Iraq,

This is the nature of democracy: You send in the planes and drop the bombs. Then you gather in the journalists and tell them to applaud. We need to study that.

MSNBC now has a lineup that includes the truly thoughtful Rachel Maddow, the entertainer Keith Olbermann, and the hacks Chris Mathews and Ed Schultz. They all qualify as liberals, I suppose, though Mathews is more like a flag in the wind. It’s an interesting experiment they are doing, but I can’t help but wonder – if Obama decides we need to attack Iran, will the network have to fire its entire evening lineup? (Probably they fire just Maddow and Olbermann. Schultz will fall in line, since it will be Obama’s war, and not Bush’s. And Mathews will go with the flow.)