richie2000's Journal: The times, they are a-changing...

FAIR has a nice little summary on media reporting on the end of the UN inspections of Iraq 4 years ago compared to their reporting on the same event today:

Excerpt:

The chief U.N. weapons inspector ordered his monitors to leave Baghdad today after saying that Iraq had once again reneged on its promise to cooperate--a report that renewed the threat of U.S. and British airstrikes.
--AP, 12/16/98

Information on Iraq's programs has been spotty since Saddam expelled U.N. weapons inspectors in 1998.
--AP, 9/7/02

On the use of Sarin gas in the war against Iran, the US State Department issued a stern verbal protest against the legitimate government of Iraq (guess who) but balanced that out with the following reprimand against Iran:

"The United States finds the present Iranian regime's intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations."

Bada-bing!

"In September (1988), the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq. These sanctions were nothing like today's global embargo. They called for a halt to U.S. military aid, commodity credits and loan guarantees and a ban on U.S. imports of Iraqi oil--which, in a global oil market, would have a token effect compared to the post-Gulf War global blockade imposed by the U.N."

The Reagan and Bush administrations "adamantly" opposed the bill, calling it "premature" (New York Times, 1/8/89, 9/15/88), and eventually the bill died quietly in a conference committee after being further watered down. Sanctions "would hurt U.S. exporters and worsen our trade deficit," Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly told a congressional panel in June 1990, six weeks before the invasion of Kuwait. (Kelly is now the Bush administration's top State Department official for East Asia.)"
Source: http://www.fair.org/extra/0209/iraq-gas.html

Read:
FAIR on Iraq
Human Rights Watch on Iraq
Perfessor Multigeek's journal
Twirlip's journal

*sigh*. Again the mass media wiffs it

[perfessor multigeek]

Yeah, funny about that. I find it indicative that people like Daniel Schorr are also falling for this claptrap. It reminds me of the Al Gore disinformation campaign and I wouldn't be at all surprised to have it eventually come out that this disinformation propagation was equally intentional. Of course, the other side of this is that the more the big media companies keep cutting their budgets for editorial cycles and fact-checkers, the more this sort of thing will happen. But in this case it is clear that a

Call me a cynic if you *must*, but

[schlach]

Investigative journalism is dead. [intothebuzzsaw.com]

Once a story has been printed in a paper, it may be reprinted by other papers without the need to verify the original claim beyond saying, "as reported in the -- Times."

Once something is printed in the New York Times, it is, for all practical purposes, true. If something is not printed in the New York Times, its veracity is suspect.

If you call Jeb Bush's office to ask about the claim of illegal happenings in the Florida 2000 elections, and his office denies it, it must