The media, as we know, have allowed the Pentagon and the Bush Administration to write the news for them. They act as stenographers -- everything the military or the executive puts forth is taken as fact. Investigative journalism is dead.
In the last few days, the blogosphere has noticed the latest and sickest example of media trickery. Most major news organizations (taking cues from the military who are no doubt taking cues from Cheney and Rove) now refer to all Iraqi insurgents as "Al Qaeda". Quite an effective propaganda tool devised by Bushco. Thom Hartmann noted on his radio show this morning that the number of Americans who think Saddam was connected to 9/11 is ticking back up. The media's new word game could well explain that.
Glenn Greenwald has posted another brilliant piece today on this propaganda shift.
Most absurd is the media's constant claims that the U.S. military have "killed x number of Al Qaeda in fighting today in Iraq". Really?? The AP and CNN and NBC know that those killed are members of Al Qaeda, and not Sunni insurgents or Shiite militia? Not innocent civilians caught in the crossfire?
Greenwald:
And that is to say nothing of the truly laughable notion that we are able to identify dead bodies as belonging to "Al Qaeda members" ("68 Al Qaeda militants killed!").
Glenn notes that McClatchy newspapers are, once again, the only REAL journalists on the case here
Mike Drummond, wrote an article from Iraq on Saturday specifically noting the rhetorical shift:
U.S. forces continue to battle Shiite militia in the south as well as Shiite militia and Sunni insurgents in Baghdad. Yet America's most wanted enemy at the moment is Sunni al Qaida in Iraq. The Bush administration's recent shift toward calling the enemy in Iraq "al Qaida" rather than an insurgency may reflect the difficulty in maintaining support for the war at home more than it does the nature of the enemy in Iraq. -McClatchy
And then, he nails the whole issue:
But let us focus on the underlying and most significant point of all of this. This sudden shift in describing the "enemy" in Iraq as "Al Qaeda" is the by-product of a very familiar information-producing system: namely, the administration formulates narratives, the President announces them, his top officials and military commanders recite them endlessly, and then establishment "journalists" not only write them down, but rely exclusively -- and uncritically -- on those narratives to report events. As I noted on Saturday, particularly in the Update citing the work of other bloggers who have been tracking this rhetorical shift for several months, this is exactly how the transformation of the "War in Iraq" into the newly unveiled "U.S. War Against Al Qeada" was manufactured and disseminated.
I plan to write to every media outlet that spews this junk, and ask them:
What reporter in the field has verified claims that these people are Al Qaeda members? Don't you care about the truth? Why would you report something as established fact if it has never been directly observed by reporters on the ground??
Al Qaeda?? Prove it.