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 | | Тема: Matt Taibbi looks back at how the media built new lies to cover their early ones By MATT TAIBBI Сб Апр 06, 2019 8:18 am | |
| Sixteen years ago this week, the United States invaded Iraq. We went in on an unconvincing excuse, articulated by George W. Bush in a speech days before invasion:“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq’s neighbors and against Iraq’s people.”To the lie about the possession of WMDs, Bush added a few more: that Hussein “trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaeda.” Moreover, left unchecked, those Saddam-supplied terrorists could “kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country.”The press in the wake of the WMD affair assumed the safety-in-numbers instincts of herd animals: like wildebeest, the instant 51% of the pack decides to run in a direction, they all run that way, even if it means bounding off a factual cliff. That the landscape is currently split into two different sets of wildebeest is not much of a comfort. Reporting these days is more a matter of manufactured, behind-the-scenes consensus building than an individuated process of following facts wherever they lead, no matter how inconvenient. | |
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