Our Cowardly Media

Glen Greenwald bemoans the total lack of adversarial press in America. He points to yesterday's New York Times article about the Holocaust denial conference in Iran as an example of what they should do on domestic stories as well. The Times bravely takes a stand against Holocaust denial:

The two-day meeting included no attempt to come to terms with the nature of the well-documented Nazi slaughter, offering only a platform to those pursuing the fantasy that it never happened.

Here's Greenwald:

The media abdicates its function, and becomes a propaganda arm of the government, when it simply repeats verifiably false Government claims without pointing out, as the Times did with respect to holocaust denial arguments, that the statements are false and objectively contradicted by clear evidence. And our media does that all the time.

It fails in its function to report objectively when it simply conveys claims from the Government that we invaded Iraq once Saddam refused to allow inspectors, that Democrats oppose eavesdropping on terrorists (rather than oppose eavesdropping without warrants), that Saddam Hussein worked with Al Qaeda, that Denny Hastert forced Mark Foley to resign once he learned about his IMs with pages, that the President only decided to fire Rumsfeld after the midterm election, etc...

There were many times, in 2002 and 2003, when I read The New York Times in hard-copy form delivered to my door, where the entire front page would be nothing but articles which began with "The Bush administration yesterday said" or "A senior administration official told The New York Times yesterday that . . . " And the story wasn't just that "the Government said X." The story was "X" itself, reported as fact, with the only source being what the Government said (a classic case of such "reporting" is here, from the Post). That is when the media is indistinguishable, by definition, from Pravda.

The old joke is that if Bush said the Earth is flat, the Times would write, "Earth Flat? View Differ."

One of his commenters imagines what the Times or Washington Post would print if Bush denied the Holocaust:

The politically charged controversy over whether Nazi Germany engaged in the large-scale killing of European Jews during World War II, an alleged historical event referred to as the "Holocaust" by those who believe it occurred, became the subject of partisan bickering after a reporter asked President Bush for his view on the subject. Never afraid to take a stand, the president stated firmly that "If the Nazis were really killin' all them Jews, my granddaddy wouldn't have stood for it."

Democrats eagerly pounced on Bush's statement in an effort to score political points by claiming that the "Holocaust" did in fact occur and is well documented. But the president's press secretary countered that some people also believe evolution is well documented, even though the jury is still out. Senator Joseph Lieberman, who is Jewish, said that he personally believes that the "Holocaust" may have occurred, but warned Democrats not to "play politics" with the issue by criticizing the Commander in Chief in a time of war. Lieberman also pointed to Bush's support for Israel as evidence of the president's high regard for Jews, notwithstanding the "honest difference of opinion" regarding the fate of some Jews many years ago.

Also disagreeing with Bush was Sophie Wasserman, 89, who claimed to have personally witnessed the murder of her husband and children in a Nazi "concentration camp" in the German city of Dachau. However, conservative humorist Ann Coulter disputed Wasserman's account. Coulter, using her trademark tongue-in-cheek cleverness, described Wasserman as a "vicious, senile whore" whose husband and children "probably committed suicide to get away from her."