I’m on the road this week, but was able to carve out a minute or two upon learning that some in our trusted news media seem to have lied about the Iraq War! Can you believe it?!
As Jon Stewart declared on The Daily Show last night: “The media is on it! Now this may seem like overkill. But for me, no, it’s not overkill. Because I am happy. Finally, someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq War!”…
By the way, when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow produced her excellent Hubris: Selling the Iraq War documentary in 2013, to mark the tenth anniversary of our invasion, she cited the blatant and knowing lies that resulted in the war. While congratulating her on the fine work, we also took the time to document just some of the many lies told and/or facilitated by NBC and MSNBC themselves which helped lead us into that disaster in the first place…
At the time of Maddow’s retrospective, the Syrian conflagration was just heating up, and unconfirmed rumors of Bashar al Assad’s use of chemicals weapons against his own citizens was being uncritically reported by the media — including MSNBC and NBC — while, at the same time Iraq War proponents were once again trying to renew their initial lies and reverse engineered reasons for carrying out one of the nation’s worst foreign policy blunders of all time.
All of that was pretty easy to do, considering that, even after a full year of the Iraq War, even after no WMDs had been found, along with no evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything at all to do with 9/11, a study [PDF] by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIP) and Knowledge Networks found: “A majority continues to believe that Iraq was giving substantial support to al Qaeda, while nearly half continue to believe that evidence of such support has been found. A majority believes that Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction or a major program for developing them.”
The American people had been mislead not only before the war, but even for years while it proceeded and, as we detailed, NBC had played a “key role” in that.
Moving the ball forward ten years, Maddow told viewers while promoting her documentary: “If the revisionism that we are experiencing right now, ten years later, is able to succeed, then we are doomed to repeat this again as a country some day. If we do not come to terms with what happened, and how it happened, if we do not learn the lessons of that disaster as a country, and how we were duped, how it worked, then history says we are doomed to repeat it.”
Our response at the time:
She has yet to produce any such documentary, looking into NBC’s own failures at the time.
Of course, Brian Williams and his “conflated-over-time” war stories are just one part of examining all of those mistakes. It is perhaps the smallest and most inconsequential of them. No wonder so many in the MSM are happy to spend so much time on it.
Now Jon Stewart is going to leave the Daily Show. I was wondering who could convincingly fill that spot and one name came to mind: Brad Friedman.
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Lawrence O’Donnell spent the first five minutes or so of his show tonight mourning, discussing, and trying to support Brian Williams. The whole rest of the hour was spent on Jon Stewart’s announcement. Pretty incredible. Many nice and true things said. What really wasn’t expressed so much(and for reasons well-stated in your piece here–they just don’t get it) but that is for me perhaps the most important aspect of all of Stewart’s(and Colbert’s and Oliver’s) brilliant aspects has been his reality-based alternative perspectives.
In a country so continuously bombarded with and thus so confused by propaganda, The Daily Show’s perspectives, so much more rooted in a sense of consistency, integrity, intelligence, fairness, and love have always felt to me like invaluable gifts from the universe. I think I am not alone in feeling this way. I think it’s a big part of why so many people watch and love him(and the others). Why so many of us showed up in Washington for the march to restore fear and sanity. There are so few places one can go, and so terribly few on TV, and feel like you’re actually getting help in your continuing efforts to keep your fucking head on straight amidst all the madness. There is so little sense out there. And there is so much sense on Stewart’s(and Colbert’s and Oliver’s) shows. Just an invaluable, cherished resource. In providing us with such a more humane, hilarious take on the world he also provides a measure of hope. The importance of such provision can not be overstated.
I might add(and oh look, I am adding it) these are exactly the reasons I come here to The BradBlog and why I hold you in such high esteem and affection, Brad. For me another cherished, invaluable gift from the universe. I love you. Thanks for everything.
You also have to watch Bill Moyers’s great program on the Iraq and American travisty called “Buying The War“.
Just as important today as it ever was.