This is why irresponsible behavior by the American press is so loudly denounced by bloggers, and why it is ripped to shreds by respectable and reflective journalists like Matt Welch.
In today’s Arab News, we see a story titled Free at Last for a Global Power Play by William Pfaff. In this rambling expose of anti-Bush, anti-American sentiment, we learn that:
George W. Bush’s speech on Monday, on the half-year anniversary of the World Trade Towers and Pentagon attacks, provided a more coherent statement than we had yet had on the policy he is following.
The policy’s objective and limits nonetheless remain unclear, which adds to the impression that Washington’s new working assumption is the reverse of the Orwellian postulate that “war is peace.” For the United States now, or at least for the Bush administration, peace is war.
That is right. We are warmongers with an unclear policy, but a clear enough policy that this author can assert that our only goal is global hegemony and continuing warfare so as to justify a large increase in military spending.
What does this have to do with an irresponsible American press? Several paragraphs later, the author asserts:
None of this really fits together. The action-reaction proportions are all wrong.
This administration is making use of the Sept. 11 tragedy to do what the neoconservative right has wanted for a long time, which is to renounce inconvenient treaties, junk arms control, build and test nuclear weapons, attack Saddam Hussein and abandon multilateralism, cooperation with international organizations and compromise with allies, all in order to aggrandize American international power and deal expediently with those who challenge it.
Why does that sound familiar? Oh, that is right. This is taking Dana Milbank’s blatherings in the WaPo yesterday, propping them up and taking them as legitimate and true, and then using those specious arguments as an assault on American foreign policy.
When our mainstream, ‘respectable’ journalists are irresponsible and peddle nonsense, particularly nonsense veiled as insightful or as ‘constructive criticism,’ there are opportunists both at home and abroad who seize upon their legitimized absurd opinions and use them as a foundation for another layer of false truths and distortion of the status quo. Want some more examples?
Do a google search for the Marc Herold civilian casualty reports, and then look who uses those statistics the most.
Look for the hysterical (not in the funny way) column by the LA Times on March 9th (now a pay article) about the Nuclear Posture Review, and look at the fallout from the assorted cretins and rogue states from around the globe.
Go read this take-down by Matt Welch of the buffoons at the Chronicle.
I am not asking for censorship, and I will fight that to the very end. Why can our press not be as responsible as they are free?