Will the U.S media ever learn? Or don't they want to?

This is an article from the Sunday Herald I found pretty much on the money in respect to the U.S press coverage of the buildup to the Iraq war and recent events, not least the way they reported on the Spanish election:

The US press may finally be realising it was hoodwinked over the war � but the coverage of Madrid proves it hasn�t learned. By Ian Bell

Who was it who alerted British tabloids to the �fact� that our troops on Cyprus were under imminent threat of attack from Saddam�s weapons of mass destruction? Who was it who supplied the New York Times, in September of 2002, with the �intelligence� that allowed the paper to state that Iraq had attempted to procure thousands of aluminium tubes in order to enrich uranium and produce a nuclear bomb?
These, of course, were only two of many fantasies whose roots will never properly be known. You could add the tale of yellowcake, the fairy story of mobile chemical weapons laboratories, the oft-repeated fiction that United Nations resolution 1441 made war inevitable. A year on, with carnage in Madrid marking the anniversary of the invasion, the pieces of the mosaic no longer matter much. The pattern is what counts.

Part of the pattern, a large part, can be discerned in the American press. After the election of the Spanish socialist party and the decision by its leader, Jos� Luis Rodr�guez Zapatero, to remove Spain�s troops from Iraq, newspapers in the United States were almost of one voice last week. This was, they told their readers, �appeasement� of al-Qaeda.

They may have mentioned, but certainly did not stress, that 91% of the Spanish people had opposed the war to begin with and that, unarguably, Zapatero was obeying the democratic will. Nor did American papers waste much time explaining the fury of voters in Spain towards the outgoing prime minister, Jos� Mar�a Aznar, who had attempted to spin the tragedy for electoral gain by claiming certain knowledge that the massacre had been carried out by ETA, the Basque separatist group. It was one lie too many.

Rest of Article

The author puts the deaf, blind and dumbness of the press down to patriotic reasons. I'd say that's a part of it but ownership, allegiences, control and finances play a much bigger part IMO. Now that a lot of what they blindly went along with in the Iraq buildup has been
revealed as lies, exagerations or distortions will they show that they actually do have free will and get angry, or will they prove once and for all they are only there to delude the masses? I'd say the next six months will be a good indicator.

Yes, the media is owned and controlled by people like Murdoch. The truth rarely comes out at the beginning, its only people like ATS and the true investigative journalists who eventually drag it out. You'll never get the truth while media is so blatantly controlled. A friend of mine who was a journalist actually quit because of an argument with his editor about just this thing and he said it was the best thing he could have done. So no, the media wasn't hoodwinked, it was in on the scam.

I completely concur with Gothique on that. The media/Journalists/tv anchors are thoroughly indoctrinated in the way they cover stories and completely cowed by the government and their corporate masters. They know full well that if they start coloring outside the lines, they will be looking for a new job soon. Journalists and the like are either completely and utterly willfully ignorant or are just corrupt. Intellectual Whores... Sweeney once called them (in a speech before the National Press Club)

That's pretty much my opinion too, just want to see if there's any others, though it might be hard around here...

I can actually see some good in this situation though. The control and bias of the media has never been so starkly apparent, not in my lifetime anyway, and many, many people are becoming switched onto the fact that would otherwise have plodded along regardless. The same with Bush's presidency; his administrations incompetence in pursuing their agenda has switched many people onto what they, and their equivalent leaders around the world, are really up to.

Every cloud has a silver lining I suppose...


[Edited on 22-3-2004 by kegs]

The US media is controlled by some group maby the Illumiti and it will never learn. Why do you think US media is so diffrent than the rest of the world? Because it is controlled by some group possibly the Illumiti.

it is amazing to watch our media run with certain stories and make mountains out of molehills, while other stories are brushed aside.

but i have to admit, it seems that reporters are questioning the administration much more critically now, however even though they do it, it seems that the "final" editors and decision makers choose not to ever follow up on certain stories.

Of course the media could have just accepted what the evidence that was presented at face value.
Sadam did kill many of his own people with chemical weapons. and if he didnt have them anymore why did he drag out weapons inspections for over a decade.
and Spain can do what it wants, but leaving Iraq now for whatever reason does make them look like their running away. But who knows when we leave the fundamentalist Islamics will probably claim victory anyways.