Page 70 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

60 Chapter 3

official statements were considered necessary in "balancing" out news stories on
the Downing Street Memos, even if the statements of those in power were
clearly false.
At certain points, editors and reporters did admit media complicity in
downplaying the memos, although it was often accompanied by attempts to
blame anti-war activists for making too big of a fuss over the issue. Michael
Getler, an editorial writer for the Washington Post, quoted segments of the
memo after he was "inundated" with emails from "self-described media
watchdog organizations7' that were "on the liberal side of things," and critical of
the paper's lack of attention toward the memos. Getler responded to the
complaints by acknowledging that, "the reaction to the failure to cover it.. .is
~nderstandable."'~ Another contributor to the Washington Post, Michael
Kinsley, was harsher than Getler on the critics of the Washington Post's
reporting. Kinsley, addressing the memo after "about the 200th e-mail. . .
demanding that I cease my personal cover-up," argued that, "fixing intelligence
and facts to fit a desired policy is the Bush II governing style."" From this
admission, one could conclude that editors at the Washington Post felt the
Downing Street Memos offered little to nothing new to the discussion on pre-
war deliberations of the Bush administration.
American television networks also reported the memos, but were reluctant
to frame them as evidence that the Bush and Blair governments deliberately
deceived the public. To do so may well have led many Americans to fault the
media as well for its failure to expose systematic deceptions that took place
before the 2003 invasion. Salon reported, through an overall analysis of
television coverage, that, "between May 1 and June 6, [2005] the story received
twenty mentions on ChN, Fox News, MSMIC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS
combined."12 According to the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting (FAIR), the first major mention of the memo by the T.V. networks, on
May 15, 2005, was on ABC's Sunday Morning show This Week, where
Republican Senator John McCain was asked about it. He replied that he did not
"agree with it" and then the host George Stephanopoulos promptly dropped the
issue.13
Some British news outlets joined watchdog groups in the U.S. and criticized
the American mass media for its failure to extensively report its contents or
make it into a serious political issue. The Independent of London noted on June
9 that Americans were turning against Bush and the Iraq war, according to polls.
However, the paper concluded that the Downing Street Memo "is unlikely to
have played much role as it has been given little prominence in mainstream US
reporting."14 Michael Smith of the Sunday Times of London stated concerning
the memo: "It is one thing for the New York Times or the Washington Post to say
that we were being told that the intelligence was being fixed by sources inside
the CIA or Pentagon or the NSC and quite another to have documentary
confirmation in the form of the minutes of a key meeting with the Prime
Minister's offi~e."'~