What do we call the enemy? (Excellent essay on verbiage in Iraq coverage)

[Barrett808]

What do we call the enemy?
By Tom Engelhardt

Last week, through a front-page reconsideration of its Iraq reporting written by media columnist Howard Kurtz ("The Post on WMDs: An inside story"), the Washington Post finally hung out a piece or two of its dirty laundry. This comes three months after the New York Times buried its Iraq mea culpa on page 10 (and then its ombudsman Daniel Okrent did a far more forthcoming consideration of the same).

The fact is that while its editorial page was beating the drums for war, Post prewar reportage was in general marginally better than that of the Times. It had no obvious raging embarrassments like Times reporter Judith Miller's shameful pieces and, more recently, from Walter Pincus to Mike Allen to Dana Priest, it was on the beat of real Bush administration stories in Washington far sooner than its Times equivalents. Still, it has a good deal to apologize for ("from August 2002 through the March 19, 2003, launch of the war, the Post ran more than 140 front-page stories that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq. Some examples: 'Cheney says Iraqi strike is justified'; 'War cabinet argues for Iraq attack'; 'Bush tells United Nations it must stand up to Hussein or US will'; 'Bush cites urgent Iraqi threat'; 'Bush tells troops: Prepare for war'"), though you'll find no apologies here, certainly not for the front-paging of administration war propaganda and the nixing or burying of what prewar questioning its reporters did.

You'll also find the following howler from executive editor Leonard Downie Jr: "We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale," not to speak of Bob Woodward's claim that "We had no alternative sources of information" - at a moment when he knew from the horse's mouth, so to speak, that the Bush administration was intent on war with Iraq. (Of course, you didn't need insider sources to grasp this, just a pair of eyes and ears.) Imagine, though, that Washington's imperial paper of record was focused only on discovering what then couldn't have been more obvious to tens of millions of people around the world: that the Bush administration was hell-bent on and determined only to go to war, WMD (weapons of mass destruction) or no. So imagine, in turn, Kurtz is the best we can hope for a year and a quarter after Baghdad was taken, after a series of tsunami-like events that have sent the Bush administration reeling, long after every aspect of its WMD claims has gone down those "aluminum tubes" (doubts about which the Post admits to having back-paged) and into oblivion. And they say the president has a tough time acknowledging error!

Self-censorship, conformity, and craven bowing to Bush administration propaganda of the sort admitted to by the Washington Post are, however, just the tip of the media iceberg. The Post, via Kurtz, is only not-apologizing for what was actually written and where it was placed in the paper. It remains beyond anyone's wildest dreams to hope that the United States' major papers would devote the slightest thought to stories that logically should have been covered but simply went missing in action (MIA). So for the rest of this dispatch, let me just focus on US Iraq reportage since the taking of Baghdad and offer my own little non-inclusive list of occupation/war stories that seem to me to have gone MIA - and these are only the ones that, with my limited public sources and limited knowledge, I can see from here. Then, because every war has its war words that are meant to bend embattled reality to someone's advantage, I want to consider a few recent examples of Iraq war words and how the press has dealt with them.

Missing stories

1. Air power. Air power has been at the heart of the US style of war since World War II. With the sole exception of Central America in the Ronald Reagan era, from the Korean War in the early 1950s to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s to the 2001 "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad, the application of massive air power (or more recently of cruise missiles), often unopposed, has been the essence of war as Americans have fought it. It strikes us Americans as completely normal to be able to bring air power to bear in situations where the enemy of choice has neither air power of its own, nor any but the most minimal air defenses.

(much more)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FH21Ak02.html