The Fundamental Unreliablity of America's Media | CommonDreams.org

The Fundamental Unreliablity of America's Media | CommonDreams.org

The Fundamental Unreliablity of America's Media

by Glenn Greenwald

Consider the record of the American media over the last two weeks alone. Justin Elliott of TPM documents how an absolute falsehood about the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing -- that Abdulmuttab purchased a "one-way ticket" to the U.S., when it was actually a round-trip ticket -- has been repeated far and wide by U.S. media outlets as fact. Two weeks ago, Elliott similarly documented how an equally false claim from ABC News -- that two of the Al Qaeda leaders behind that airliner attack had been released from Guantanamo -- became entrenched as fact in media reports (at most, it is one of them, not two). This week, Dan Froomkin chronicles how completely discredited claims about Guantanamo recidivism rates continue to be uncritically "reported" by The New York Times and then inserted into our debates as fact.

As I documented two weeks ago, government claims about which "top Al Qeada fighters" were killed by our airstrikes turn out to be untrue far more often then true, yet are always mindlessly featured by our media, ensuring little questioning of those actions; at least two of the three Top Terrorists claimed to have been killed by our airstrikes in Yemen -- and possibly all three -- are quite likely alive. As Greg Sargent writes, one of the most provocative and inflammatory claims of the trashy Halperin/Heilmann gossip book -- that Bill Clinton told Ted Kennedy that Obama would have been "getting us coffee" just a couple years earlier -- is not only completely unsourced (like virtually every one of their sleazy claims), but also "paraphrased."

Aside from falsity, what do all of these deceitful reports have in common? They're all the by-product of granting anonymity to people and then repeating what they claim as fact, protected by their journalist-guaranteed anonymity from any and all accountability for their falsehoods. ...
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Two other media points:

(1) I've been writing frequently of late about the perception disparities between Americans and the Muslim world due not to their propaganda-based ignorance but to ours. Here's a somewhat old but highly illustrative example: in 1996, then-Secretary-of-State Madeline Albright was asked by 60 Minutes about the fact that American sanctions on Iraq resulted in the deaths of "half million children," to which Albright dismissively replied: "We think the price is worth it." At the time, FAIR documented that while the number of dead Iraqi children -- as well as Albright's quote -- was known far and wide in predominantly Muslim countries, it was almost completely blacked-out in the American press.

(2) Last night, Brian Williams began his NBC News broadcast by expressing extreme and righteous anger over a truly momentous scandal: Mark McGwire's steriod use, telling his audience: "Because this is a family broadcast, we probably can't say what we'd like to about the news today." If Williams has expressed even a small inkling of an objection -- let alone righteous outrage -- over things like torture, lies that led to the Iraq War, chronic surveillance lawbreaking and the like, I'd be quite surprised. ...