US press's new self-serving myth

Hats off to Joe Conason in Salon for once again bursting the US mainstream news media's self-inflated myth about the Iraq war. Conason's target is the media myth that "The memo wasn't news because Americans already knew that the Bush administration was 'fixing the intelligence and facts around the policy,' rather than making policy that reflected the intelligence and the facts about Iraq [Emphasis added]." (I heard this myth expressed again even by USA Today's Mark Memmott - who finally reported on the DSM for his paper - on last week's On the Media, and then again by Susan Page, USA Today's Washington bureau chief on today's Diane Rehm Friday roundup). The myth is as pervasive as it is instant. And it's wrong, argues Conason, whose piece (reprinted in Truthout) argues for clear duplicity on the part of the MSM.

Of the journalists at the Times and even the Post, Conason states:

Only a very special brand of arrogance would permit any employee of the New York Times, which brought us the mythmaking of Judith Miller, to insist that new documentary evidence of "intelligence fixing" about Saddam's arsenal is no longer news. The same goes for the Washington Post, which featured phony administration claims about Iraq's weapons on Page 1 while burying the skeptical stories that proved correct.

This refers - quite correctly - to these papers' mea culpas about their desultory performance reporting fully on the run-up to the war. This brings Conason to the new media myth. Conason notes comments by the Times's and the Post's - as well as by Michael Kinsley - that show that what they're saying now about the inevitability of war is not what they were saying in 2002. He concludes, "Instead of pretending that we all knew what we know now, the Washington press corps should stop spinning excuses, stop redefining what constitutes news and start doing its job."