We don't need censorship in this country, we just ignore the facts


My friend, Steve Fournier, who I mentioned in a recent post, has just posted a new entry on his site, to which I thought I would draw attention. Steve decided to do some TV watching after he noticed that the media had generally ignored the John Hopkins study about the number of deaths in Iraq, which I wrote about some time ago.

The media did not ignore the study, of course. It was reported and dismissed, since it didn't fit in the narrative, and no less a source of all wisdom then George Bush, in his guise as expert in mathematics, declared the methodology flawed.

Steve found that the story was ignored not only in the commercial media, but on the supposedly non-partisan C-Span:

It didn’t surprise me that the story was absent from the commercial media, which openly censors its reports about Iraq. ... the last public word on the study was George Bush's comment--false, but unrebutted in the media--that the authors' methodology was faulty. The public was left with the impression that the number of victims was much lower, and the major media were content to let that impression stand.

C-SPAN has a web site where they catalog everything they do, along with a good deal of extraneous material, and that's where I went to check. As I discovered, not only is C-SPAN riding the censorship bandwagon, its selection of programming on Iraq during November makes you wonder whether its acronymic moniker should stand for "Carefully Selected Propaganda As News" and not "Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network."

Of the 15 hours I watched, all but an hour or so originated from Washington, and almost everything was about events in Washington. ...

The narrowness of the range of opinion was shocking, with nearly all the speakers coming from the right wing or far right wing. U. S. government officials were overrepresented, accounting for 12 of the 15 hours of broadcast time. Of the 35 segments I watched, only one, a half-hour in length, advocated prompt military withdrawal. Some 25 segments tended to favor a continuation of the occupation. Six segments were ostensibly neutral, expressing criticism of the government's handling of the conflict without recommending any particular change of course. Military and former military officials accounted for 11 hours of programming.

There were two conferences, both slanted in favor of the government line, and seven hours devoted to armed services committee hearings in the House and Senate. A couple of faces—John Abizaid, David Satterfield, Bing West—kept on popping up.

Almost everything involved prognostication, prediction, and opinion. Fact was not a concern, and events were not a focus. There was much talk about what might be in the report of the Iraq Study Group, not so much on factual side as on what recommendations might be forthcoming.

In fifteen hours and 35 segments, there was not a single mention of the mortality report I was concerned about. Nobody asked about it, and nobody commented on it. American casualties were mentioned several times, but discussion of Iraqi casualties was censored out.

First, hats off to Steve for enduring 15 hours of C-Span, no matter how widely spaced the shows. The results of his mini-study are hardly surprising. C-Span could put war opponents on, but that would be irresponsible, given that those who oppose the war, particularly those who opposed it from the start, are not considered serious people in the looking-glass world of the Washington insiders. It would obviously be truly irresponsible to publicize the findings of a bunch of statisticians, no matter how sound the methodology employed, if their results conflict with the official line and with the gut reaction of our divinely appointed Leader. We don't need mandated censorship in this country so long as our media can be counted on to ignore the facts. The American people can be incredibly stupid at times, but they do have to be given credit for having figured out the mess that is Iraq long before it was acknowledged in the press.
Posted: Saturday - December 16, 2006 at 09:59 PM          

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