Some professional journalism types are just now starting to play
catch-up, bless their hearts.
To demonstrate this phenomenon, we first have to do some of that No Fair
Remembering Stuff.
This is an excerpt from WHYY Boston's Philadelphia's* PBS
station, from December of 2014. And it is recounting events going back
to 2001 and 2002:
But the thing is, Dick Cheney always Knows.
His brand is blind certitude – “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein
now has weapons of mass destruction,” “We will in fact be greeted as
liberators,”
and the rest of his greatest hits – yet Meet the Press continues to
indulge him. Which brings me to yesterday’s most groan-worthy moment.
At one point, host Chuck Todd asked Cheney whether he has any regrets
about toppling Saddam Hussein. Cheney naturally said no, because Hussein “had previously had twice nuclear programs going. He produced and used
weapons of mass destruction. And he had a ten-year relationship with Al
Qaeda.” (Italics are mine.)
For more than a decade on Meet the Press, Cheney has been peddling
variations of that lie – the lie that Hussein plotted 9/11 with Al Qaeda –
in order to justify the ruinous invasion of Iraq. And he’s still doing it.
And his hosts are still letting him get away with it.
Most notoriously, in December 2001 and in September 2002, Cheney said on
the show that it was “pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 ringleader Mohamed
Atta had met in Prague with a Saddam secret agent “several months before
the attack.” Actually, it had not been confirmed. As the bipartisan 9/11
Commission reported in 2004, the Atta-Hussein connection had been nothing
more than a rumor.
The 9/11 Commission said that Al Qaeda and the Hussein regime had
occasionally communicated over the years, but “we have seen no evidence
that these contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational
relationship. Nor have we seen any evidence indicating that Iraq
cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against
the United States.”
Three years later, in 2007, a report by the Pentagon’s Joint Forces
Command reached the same conclusion. There was ” no ‘smoking gun’ between
Saddam’s Iraq and Al Qaeda,” the defense analysts wrote, because Saddam
and Al Qaeda didn’t trust each other. “To the fundamentalist leadership of Al Qaeda, Saddam represented the worst
kind of ‘apostate’ regime. A secular police state well practiced in
suppressing internal challenges.”
If a “liberal” media outpost like Meet the Press
persists in putting Cheney on the air, the least it should do is
fact-check him by quoting the 9/11 Commission and the Pentagon report.
Giving him free rein to lie yet again – in support of a long-discredited
war rationale – is arguably far worse than giving him the mic to make the
case for torture.
Put a pin in the these statements: "'liberal' media outpost like Meet the Press" and "the least it should do is fact-check him".
A big pin.
Early on it came to be known to anyone who was paying attention that the
venerable
Meet the Press was, in fact, Dick Cheney's favorite place to put his
lies into the public record because they never pushed back.
From
The LA Times,
February 12, 2007:
Those of us who get a kick out of watching Tim Russert every Sunday on
NBC’s “Meet the Press” are feeling a little hangdog these days. We always
thought Big Russ Jr. was tough on the powerful. Now we learn that to some
Washington media types on both the right and the left, he’s just a tool
for the powerful.
What’s occasioned this perceptual turnabout is, of course, the perjury
and obstruction trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former top aide to
Vice President Dick Cheney, where Russert wrapped up two days of testimony
last week. Libby says the NBC newsman fed him the name of CIA operative
Valerie Plame Wilson, who is at the center of the trial. Russert says he
didn’t.
To ordinary viewers, though, whatever transpired during Libby’s phone
call to Russert back in 2003 couldn’t be as jarring as what the trial has
unearthed about Washington’s deeply cynical attitude toward “Meet the
Press,” a venerable, 60-year-old staple of network TV and the No. 1-rated
Sunday news talk show.
A former Cheney press aide testified last month that she pushed to get
the vice president on Russert’s show to bat down negative news because it
was “our best format,” a program where political handlers can “control the
message.”
We now rejoin the present-day, already in progress...
This is from Margaret Sullivan who, some of you may know, is the former
media columnist for The Washington Post, and the fifth public editor of The
New York Times and the first woman to hold the position. In that role, she
reported directly to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. as the "readers' representative".
From her newsletter yesterday.
As Donald Trump continued his chaotic and destructive march through a
second term, the New York Times had a few choice words for what he’s
doing, as they promoted an audio offering.
“Trump’s New Charm Offensive.” I posted the full headline on
social media, asking “Really, NYT?” and one respondent said she was so
upset when she saw it earlier that day, she canceled her subscription
over it.
That seems extreme since the Times has done a lot of very good
reporting in recent weeks. But the headline does seem quite unhinged
from reality, and it makes me wonder why no one stopped to question or
change it. It represents the soft-focus presentation we see all too
often that may well be an intentional business strategy on the part of
the Times — everybody invited in to the big tent.
Here’s another over a David Sanger piece about how Trump’s policies
supposedly would restore America’s manufacturing economy. (Sanger is
excellent and deeply experienced, and the piece itself — mostly about
Trump’s tariffs — is well reported.) The headline:
“Trump’s Big Bet: Americans Will Tolerate Economic Downturn to
Restore Manufacturing.”
As one Times reader aptly commented: “The headline here is misleading —
none of Trump’s current policies will do anything to bring back
manufacturing (quite the opposite) so treating Trump’s hypothesis as
even remotely plausible is a massive disservice.” Here’s a gift version
of the article; judge for yourself, and do scan the scathing
comments.
Why does The Times too often normalize Trump like this, even now?
Readers, your thoughts? Let me know. I have some theories, hinted at
above and probably to be further developed in a separate post.
Ms. Sullivan was a journalist at the Post and the Times for decades, as well
as the the public editor at the Times, which gave her daily one-on-one contact
with the Times' publisher, so why in the name of
Breslin and Royko is she asking her readers for their "thoughts" on the
motives behind the Times' publishing this drivel?
How the fuck would they know? Also, Liberal bloggers have already spent
more than 20 year theorizing why the Times and the rest of the legacy
media are so addicted to Both Siderist bullshit, and are so prone to going
soft and belly-up when confronted with belligerent Republican fuckery,
So instead coyly trying to crowdsource speculation about a question to which, as a former member of the Times' inner circle, you should damn well
already know, why don't you tell us in plain,
clear language why Sulzberger is doing this? Or engage in that, y'know,
journalism thing and do what none of the rest of us have the standing to
pull off: call Sulzberger directly and ask him?
Meanwhile, over in the March 6, 2025 edition of
The Contrarian, former CNN employee Josh Levs says
"fact checks" are too little
too late:
"What we need in America is a truth countermovement."
Why all those Trump fact checks are too little too late
Many Americans distrust the media, largely because false claims have gone
unchallenged for so long.
In the latest episode of my podcast They Stand Corrected, which fact
checks the news, I looked at the Sunday political talk shows. By the time
I pieced through the transcript for just one of those shows, I found more
uncorrected misstatements of fact than I could cover in a single
episode.
First, put another pin in this sentence: "By the time I pieced through the transcript for just one of those shows, I
found more uncorrected misstatements of fact than I could cover in a single
episode." Another big pin. We shall revisit it later.
Second, wowzers!
You mean the crown jewels of American political reportage were riddled with
uncorrected lies?
Tell me more!
For example, on a recent Meet the Press, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said, “What Oklahomans
want is to make sure that we get rid of the waste and fraud inside the
federal government. And that's exactly what the president has done.
They've already identified billions, billions of dollars of waste and
fraud for the taxpayers.”
Host Kristen Welker mentioned that “they haven't provided proof of
fraud.” But Mullin’s claim about all that alleged “waste” went
uncorrected, even as he repeated it. “Within only four short weeks, we've
already identified over fifty-five billion dollars of waste and fraud,” he
insisted. That's not true. At the time of the interview, there was already
proof that “DOGE,” the Department of Government Efficiency, had no clue
what it was doing. Viewers wouldn’t know this.
Mullin was also asked about protests across the country and in his home
state. “The chair of the DNC, Ken Martin, openly admitted on MSNBC just
yesterday that they were manufacturing these protests,” he insisted. “They
were bussing in armies to manufacture these protests.” None of this is
true. But NBC’s Meet the Press let that claim go.
Meanwhile, CBS’ Face the Nation interviewed Trump's Middle East envoy,
Steve Witkoff, who had met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at
Trump’s request. “We've had, you know, close to a million-and-a-half
deaths” in the Ukraine war, he claimed. No. Trump and his team have thrown
around figures like that, but none of the figures available about Russia’s
war on Ukraine shows casualty counts anywhere near that high. But no one
watching that interview would know.
When I bring up this problem to news executives, they often respond with
some version of, “Well, it's live. How are we supposed to fact check
everything?” That's faulty thinking. Who says all this has to be live?
What if news agencies—shocking idea—pre-recorded interviews and only aired
them with fact checks?
And the solution?
What we need in America is a truth countermovement: a national demand
for the media to cut through disinformation and deliver only the truth,
always.
Until then, Americans will all too often be left freezing in a
blizzard, drenched by a firehose, or under fire amid a blitzkrieg. And
unscrupulous leaders will continue to wreak havoc through shameless
lying.
I must now reveal a terrible truth about myself. For the better
part of two decades I ran a feature on my little blog out here in the middle
of Middle America called "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" or "Sunday's Mouse
Circus" or "Voice of Empire". I got bored every few years and
changed the name.
Anyway, every Sunday I wrote out a long deconstruction of most of the network
Sunday Shows. I started doing this back at Castle Driftglass in Chicago,
before I had cable or any "Pause" or "Rewind" capacity. This was before
YouTube had video clips up for reference (Hell, practically before YouTube
existed) and before transcripts were readily available.
I watched as many as I could manage, live, on over-the-air broadcast teevee,
remote in-hand, clicking back and forth between them all, or as many as I
could stand, and transcribing as fast as I could, or at least extracting the
gist and presenting it in my own, uh, style.
Here's a sample. From me in
January of 2006. And, yes, that's 19 years ago...
Sunday Morning Comin’ Down
Wherein the GOP demonstrate their “Pre-1776” mindset.
Two quick-and-dirty highlights right up front that had me worried about my
mental health.
On Fox….in his ongoing fit of “Everybody Does It!”, Dirty-Jack
was-a-bipartisan-pimp compulsive onanism, Chris Wallace frantically
Abramoff’s himself all over his guest’s clean, Progressive suit, followed
by an interview a coupla “Young Guns of the GOP”.
(Last week it was three Republican “reformers” that had squeegeed enough
Dirty Jack Wank off their faces for us to see their lyin’ eyes and,
forming a Papa, Mama and Baby Bear GOP Denial Kickline, managed to force
their mouths to say the words “GOP Reformers” without that chemical
cocktail that supersized The Joker’s pie-hole in “Batman”.
The contest, last week and this, is now how far and how fast can you
distance yourself from Abramoff, and how many times can you repeat a
variation of the phrase “bipartisan scandal”.
Abramoff? Never met the man.
Jack Abramoff? Never heard of him.
Lifelong-GOP-powerbroke-and-my-son’s-godfather, Jack Abramoff??? Why, he
doesn’t even really exist. He’s just a Neocon Kaiser Soze we dreamed up; a
myth to scare little Republicans.
As twas prophesied, they shall deny him three times before the cock crows.
And Andy Sullivan wasn’t even on the Matthews’ Show this week.)
And then, on NBC – this week as last -- Chris Matthews doodles “George +
Chris 4ever!!!” all over his Sunday Morning spiral-notebook, and openly
pines and sighs for his Strong Man President to Rhett Butler him up the
stairs, into the Lincoln Bedroom, for some rough, fascist sex that will
finally make a real woman out of him...
FYI, the post goes on and on, covering most of the Sunday Shows. For
context, at this point George W. Bush's little over-by-Christmas Iraqi
adventure was a full-on clusterfuck and now everyone could see
it. Which made all the usual Conservative pundits (who has spent the
last few years giddily shitting all over us Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving
Liberals on these very same shows) very uncomfortable.
Here, preserved in the digital amber of my blog archives, was just such a
moment on "This Week...". From the same
January, 2006 post.
[George] Will unpacks his wee soapbox, clambers atop it, and says, sure, we
can bomb the crap out of Iran and knock it back ten years or so.
But, Will asks, “Then what?”
“That’s the question. That’s the question we didn’t ask bef…”
And in that perfect little jewel of a moment you could positively
smell Karl Rove tickling the joystick that controls the high-voltage, barbed
wire cock-ring that the GOP keeps wrapped around the withered sac of its pet
journalists.
George unwrapped his lips from around the words he was just about to say
like a man stung in the gums by a wasp the size of an Escalade. He then
quickly shifted gears and began nattering on about Admiral Yamamoto telling
the Japanese high command that, sure, he could attack the U.S. fleet and run
wild in the Pacific for a “year and a day.”
…but “Then What?”
Of course the statement Will was verging on making before Karl the Klown
jolted him back to goodthinkfulness was this:
“That’s the question. That’s the question we didn’t ask…before we invaded
Iraq.”
But of course, that’s kind of a sore subject; one that the Stalinist Right
has striven mightily to stomp down the ol’ Memory Hole and piss away into
the mists of forgotten myth and lore.
Because, of course, people did ask that question before Dubya rolled our
children into Iraq to be slaughtered behind his PNAC fantasies and petroleum
dream, didn’t they George?
Millions and millions and millions of people asked that very question.
Very Loudly.
They were called Democrats, George.
And your Party called them unAmerican, remember George?
And even the Democrats who supported the invasion of Iraq –- and there were
many of them -- made it very clear that they were not giving your President
a blank check.
The Dem’s made it abundantly clear that there needed to be concrete,
convincing evidence of an imminent threat. Evidence of WMDs delivered by
inspectors on the ground. Evidence of some linkage to 9/11.
They demanded that enough troops be used to get the job done. And they
insisted on a clear exit strategy.
And your President mumbled, “Yeah…Ok…whatever”, blew off every warning and
caution, grabbed the keys to the car and drove it right off the fucking
cliff, didn't he George?
And the Democrats who had made the epic mistake of trusting a dim little
creep like George Bush to behave responsibly with the national Credit Card?
Your Party called them weak and cowardly, remember George?
Funny how you seem the effortlessly remember, oh, say, every stray stat
surrounding Cal Koonce’s ERA, but can’t seem to remember these rather
vitally important, life-and-death facts about your Party and President,
isn’t is George?...
Once again, back in present day, someone needs to tell former CNN employee
Josh Levs that my stuff is not unique. A lot of other Liberal bloggers and
podcasters were doing this too, and some still are. We didn't just
"[piece] through the transcript for just one of those shows" one time:
collectively we deconstructed all of the shows, every Sunday, for decades.
And you know what, Josh? It didn't make the slightest difference.
In fact, all of those shows just kept getting exponentially worse.
So Josh, when you say
"What we need in America is a truth countermovement." I don't know
whether to laugh or cry or simply reply, you mean like... Liberal bloggers and
podcasters?
Because we're already out here, Josh, promiscuously violating the legacy media
rules about not remembering inconvenient things every day,
And we've been doing it for decades.
*Thanks Alert Readers for the catch!
I Am The Liberal Media
