Back in the days before the Soviet Union collapsed in the rubble of its economy there used to be a joke about two of the evil empire’s principal media sources, Pravda and Trud. In Russian, Pravda, loosely translated, means news, and Trud means truth.
The less reverent among the Russian people, when there were no KGB thugs within earshot, would say that “there’s no news in Pravda and no truth in Trud.”
Nowadays, when Pravda.ru is a reasonably reliable news source, it is in the U.S. media that a reader or listener will search in vain for either real news or truth.
In recent days this has become abundantly clear – the media has shamelessly abandoned any pretense of unbiased or truthful reporting – Americans are being presented with neither truth nor facts by the mainstream media upon which they rely for most of their information about current events – information they need if they are to make sound judgments on the vital issues of our times.
A case in point: CIA weapons inspector David Kay’s interim report on the status of his hunt for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. As has been widely noted by conservative journalists, the U.S. media has deliberately downplayed the significance of his findings, leaping with joy as they misleadingly report that Kay found nothing worth noting – that it was just one more piece of evidence that the administration had lied about Saddam’s arsenal of WMDs.
Said Kay: “I’m sort of amazed that what was powerful information about both Iraq’s intent and its actual activities that were not known and were hidden from U.N. inspectors seems not to have made it to the press. This is information that, had it been available last year, would have been headline news.”
Speaking of Kay’s report, Secretary of State Colin Powell said “President Bush was right: This was an evil regime, lethal to its own people, in deepening material breach of its Security Council obligations, and a threat to international peace and security. Hussein would have stopped at nothing until something stopped him. It’s a good thing that we did.”
The San Diego Union Tribune, to their credit, bridled at the media’s deceitful reporting on the Kay report, editorializing that: “The headlines on David Kay’s report to Congress focused on the failure, so far, to find chemical and biological weapons or evidence that Iraq had resumed the active pursuit of nuclear weapons. Too little attention was focused on what Kay did find.”
The editorial laid out the shocking information Kay unearthed over three months of searching:
- unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein was, in fact, hiding evidence of prohibited weapons programs from United Nations weapons inspectors;
- that Iraq was preserving the option of resuming chemical and biological weapons production;
- that a potential nuclear weapons program was being held in abeyance pending an easing of international pressure;
- that Iraq was actively seeking to extend the range of its ballistic missiles in violation of U.N. limitations imposed in 1991 at the end of the Persian Gulf War;
- that Iraqi documents show that Saddam Hussein’s government was attempting to purchase prohibited long-range missiles from North Korea, and hiding that from U.N. weapons inspectors.
“For now, however, the obvious conclusion from even this interim report is that pre-emptive military action did preclude the future threat apparent in Kay’s discoveries,” the editorial noted. “There is every reason to believe, based on Saddam Hussein’s past crimes and aggression, that he posed a threat to his own people, to his neighbors and, sooner or later, to those he considered his international arch-enemies, the United States and its principal allies.
“President Bush, drawing the needed lessons from the catastrophic terrorist attacks of 9/11, hardly needs to apologize for acting before Saddam’s evil regime could produce a new arsenal of horror weapons. ”
To the liberal mainstream media, none of that was worth reporting. To them, the Kay report was a dud – a bald-faced media lie they couldn’t wait to spread as far and wide as possible.
Then there is the matter of the media’s current darling, the omnipresent Joseph Wilson whose nonstop popping up on the TV screens reminds me of the story Abraham Lincoln told about a man named Green, an incessant job hunter who shadowed him wherever he went and who he could not avoid.
Once asked to describe his daily routine he gave an hour-by-hour rundown of his activities right up until bedtime ending with this remark: “Then I get down on my knees to pray, look under the bed and then look up to Heaven and thank God Green is not there.”
Check your own bed tonight – there’s every chance Wilson might be there waiting to tell you what a dreadful man George Bush is, what a great man John Kerry is, and what a smashing blonde “star” his third wife is.
L’Affaire Wilson, began, it appears, when Vice President Cheney wondered if it was true as some intelligence agencies had reported that Saddam had tried to buy enriched Uranium known as “yellowcake” in Africa. The CIA then, for reasons never adequately explained, sent former Ambassador Wilson to Nigeria to find out if the story was true.
Everything gets murky here, as most matters having to do with the spooks of Langley tend to get. It is widely believed that either Mrs. Wilson recommended sending her husband, or somebody at the agency made the choice and asked Mrs. Wilson to convey that fact to her husband.
Anyway, Wilson went to Nigeria, spent eight days there and then came back to make his report which he never reduced to writing. If some reports are true, Wilson met his wife in Paris where she was on vacation and made his oral report to her, raising speculation that the whole mission might have been meant to provide cover for a romantic tryst in Paris.
Wilson then came home and sat down in July and wrote an op-ed piece trashing President Bush.
Columnist Bob Novak, who can smell a rat a mile away, wondered why in the world was Wilson – a known enemy of the Bush administration and the President – and totally unqualified to conduct clandestine missions for the CIA was sent by that agency to Africa.
When he asked a couple of “high administration” sources why Wilson had been picked, he was told, in what he called an offhand manner, that, by the way Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame worked for the CIA and had made the recommendation that her hubby get the job.
The media has deliberately distorted the facts in this case, which even Newsweek admits will never result in a prosecution because it does not meet the intent of the law forbidding naming CIA spooks which as Michael Reagan has pointed out, was in fact tailored to prevent one Philip Agee from outing any more CIA assets abroad and getting them killed as the Cuban (DGI) intelligence asset Agree had been doing.
Wilson is being elevated to media sainthood, nobody is following up on Bob Novak’s original quest to discover how this publicity crazed John Kerry acolyte ever got sent abroad on an intelligence mission in the first place. Or paying any attention to Congressman Peter King’s demand that Wilson be investigated for blabbing about his mission.
“I assume that if he went into this job for the CIA, he had to sign an oath of secrecy – a confidentiality” agreement, Mr. King told WABC Radio’s Steve Malzberg. “And if he did, then he violated it and he should be prosecuted.”
King added: “He conducted a so-called ‘secret’ mission for the CIA. [However] he’s talking about it all over national and international television — undermining the president of the United States. … Why wasn’t this guy called in before a grand jury?”
Why indeed? Don’t expect the liberal media to get the answer for you. They are too busy canonizing Wilson who is now busy keeping his story alive by all of a sudden wringing his hands over his wife’s safety who he told Don Imus, was at the moment so worried about her safety she was taking the kids to school, obviously sans hordes of security agents to protect her.
When an ally of the Wilsons’, an ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson told the media that he had been a colleague of Mrs. Wilson and who he said had been “operating undercover” for “three decades,” [30 years] the media blatantly ignored the fact that Mrs. Wilson is 40 years old, which the Washington Post, in reporting Johnson’s remark, managed to mention without commenting on the obvious absurdity of Johnson’s claim.
It took NewsMax.com to report that three decades ago Mrs. Wilson was just 10 years old – somewhat young to be a CIA undercover agent.
On Tuesday, Wilson appeared on the Imus in the Morning show. Imus, was himself somewhat puzzled by Wilson’s appearance on his show, since he had appeared on just about every TV show now on the air. Imus, explained that Wilson would be there because MSNBC had asked him to have the man appear on his show. MSNBC, it seems, can’t get enough of Wilson’s Bush bashing.
Then we have the Arnold Schwarzenegger “groping” scandal played up with the same intensity the Los Angeles Times would probably devote to the atom bombing of San Francisco. Even the ultra liberal Susan Estritch could not stomach the Times’ pursuit of Schwarzenegger – charging him with all sorts of sexual improprieties against a host of women, with few identified as anything other than anonymous.
The Times, she charged “has been acting more like a cheerleader for Gray Davis than an objective source of information …” and she predicted voters would reject the smear “as more Davis-like dirty politics.”
All three of these displays of outright media dishonesty have taken place in the space of a couple of weeks. It seems as if they just don’t care any longer if their biases are laid bare by their sleazy activities. They figure there’s nothing we can do about their skullduggery anyway so why bother hiding it?