Media Caught up in the Spin Cycle

by Antonia Zerbisias

This past weekend, the two most influential media organs in the U.S., The New York Times and The Washington Post, both published stories about Iranian weapons in Iraq. Both stories relied on unnamed U.S. military officials who claimed that, as the Post put it, "Iranian security forces, taking orders from the `highest levels' of the Iranian government, are funnelling sophisticated explosives to extremist groups in Iraq, and the weapons have grown increasingly deadly for U.S.-led troops over the past two years." This after a briefing where reporters had to agree not to identify the officials, and also had to check their electronic equipment at the door. As the Times' progressive Paul Krugman wrote yesterday, "Why wasn't any official willing to take personal responsibility for the reliability of alleged evidence of Iranian mischief, as opposed to being an anonymous source? If the evidence is solid enough to bear close scrutiny, why were all cameras and recording devices, including cellphones, banned from yesterday's Baghdad briefing?" Excuse me, but haven't we been down this road to war before? This is how it worked last time: the administration planted stories in the media and then went on the media to say that the media were reporting stories about smoking guns and mushroom clouds and hey this isn't coming from us, it's coming from the New! York! Times! All that may have been forgotten by many after four foggy years of war. Which is why tonight's debut of PBS Frontline's four-part special News War: Secrets, Spin and the Future of News is essential viewing. Not only is it a grim reminder of how the White House played the media for suckas to get their war on, it also provides a primer to the current prosecution of Vice-President Dick Cheney's former top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in connection with the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame in 2003. Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had publicly discredited President George W. Bush's line in his State of the Union address that year, just weeks before the attack on Iraq, about Saddam Hussein supposedly seeking uranium from Africa. Tonight's opener, at 9, catches the Bushies in bald-faced lies and gets into a detailed discussion of how anonymous sourcing is not what it used to be. "During Watergate, and before that, confidentiality was a tool that journalists would offer to reluctant sources to coax them to come forward,'' says the Project for Excellence in Journalism's Tom Rosenstiel to Frontline's Lowell Bergman. "That has shifted to the point where confidentiality and anonymity are conditions that a source imposes on the journalist. "That's the powerful trying to get their message out to other elites through elite media." Yes, most of the program is very American-centric, but there are lessons for Canada. For example, we now have a Prime Minister's Office that tightly controls the message. Word from Ottawa last week was that the networks, angered that the Conservatives had made unauthorized use of broadcast consortium footage for their attack ads on Stéphane Dion, got together on a group complaint. But one major private network balked at the last moment because joining the protest might not serve its best interests. This network has a major deal up for approval before the CRTC. Watch for it to land more softball exclusives with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In subsequent episodes, Frontline delves deeper into freedom of the press issues with the third hour zeroing in on how corporate owners cut costs to maintain high profit margins. Episode four tours media around the world to show Americans how it's done elsewhere, especially in the Arab world. For those who believe there is no democracy without a strong – and unleashed – watchdog, there is nothing else to watch. Needless to say those Fox News guys will hate this series. Discuss This Article click here... © Copyright Toronto Star online since 1996 ###