Where's the outrage? again . . .

I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that the U.S. mainstream media just will not tackle in a serious way the potentially damning "smoking gun" memo that implicates both the British and the U.S. governments in duplicity over their reaons for going to war in Iraq. Doctor Media drew my attention to a new Media Advisory from FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) that gives us some sense of the scale of the U.S. media's sin of omission on this issue. Just to remind us what it's all about:

A leaked document that appeared in a British newspaper offered clear new evidence that U.S. intelligence was shaped to support the drive for war. Though the information rocked British Prime Minister Tony Blair's re-election campaign when it was revealed, it has received little attention in the U.S. press.

The document, first revealed by the London Times (5/1/05), was the minutes of a July 23, 2002 meeting in Blair's office with the prime minister's close advisors. The meeting was held to discuss Bush administration policy on Iraq, and the likelihood that Britain would support a U.S. invasion of Iraq. "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided," the minutes state.

The minutes also recount a visit to Washington by Richard Dearlove, the head of the British intelligence service MI6: "There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

The Advisory goes on to map out the miniscule level of attention given to the story in the States.

While writing my previous postings on this subject last week (see Juan Cole on "smoking guns", Where's the outrage?, and in mediaville, Blair, Juan Cole, and UK-US duplicity) I hoped that this story would receive significant attention in the media. I also thought that the recent upsurge in violence in Iraq would give the story even greater currency. I'm coming to the conclusion that this is just not going to happen.

The FAIR advisory quotes Salon's Joe Conason, whose words I will repeat here:

Are Americans so jaded about the deceptions perpetrated by our own government to lead us into war in Iraq that we are no longer interested in fresh and damning evidence of those lies? Or are the editors and producers who oversee the American news industry simply too timid to report that proof on the evening broadcasts and front pages?

And FAIR's response?

As far as the media are concerned, the answer to Conason's second question would seem to be yes. A May 8 New York Times news article asserted that "critics who accused the Bush administration of improperly using political influence to shape intelligence assessments have, for the most part, failed to make the charge stick." It's hard for charges to stick when major media are determined to ignore the evidence behind them.

I can find no explanation for the agenda-setting media's attitude on this story, unless I conclude that they have, finally, all been beaten into submission by the Bush administration. Any objective determination of the story's news value should make it a page one, above the fold/top story issue, with staying power for multiple news cycles. And yet, and yet . . . Of course no-one in the Democratic Party seems to have picked up on it, and that would leave the media pushing a story on their own, without any institutional support. So they ignore it, hope it'll go away. And it probably will now.

Blair survived this story in Britain and Labour got re-elected (well, actually a narrow plurality voted for their own constituency Labour MPs, often held their noses while doing so, and tried their best to ignore the party's discredited leader). But at least there was a national debate. At least everyone now knows what Blair did, what he's like, and how much they can trust him (or not!). We cannot say that about President Bush in America.