How To Lie To America

What passes for news in American media, when it concerns government or corporate policies and actions, is frequently surreal, but almost never directly inaccurate and almost never directly controlled by our government. This is the aspect celebrated by American patriots as the glory of our Fourth Estate, the arm of our society that keeps a watchful eye on the actions of the powerful.

It certainly does. But then, a puppy keeps a watchful eye for when the dog food gets spooned out, too.

Entire books have been written--quite good ones--on how corporate U.S. media serves as a very effective propaganda system for the interests of our political and economic elites. Conservative grousing about the "liberal media" and progressive canards about conservative bias both have elements of truth, but both miss the basic point. What our big media are loyal to, more than any ideology, is power itself. When a group assumes power, its perspectives, no matter how ludicrous, become not just plausible, but obvious truths. Its truths, no matter how inaccurate, become unassailable. And so on.

And the reverse holds true for groups on the outside looking in.

Biases come in what is not reported, in the placement and context (if any) given to what is reported, and in which statements are or aren't "balanced" (or challenged). Rarely do we read in our papers, or hear on TV, an outright whopper. Sure, we can scream at the screen because of the obvious "falseness" of what we hear, but that's more likely to be a differing (and offensive) interpretation than a bald-faced lie.

It doesn't have to be. As an article last week in the L.A. Times, faithfully reprinted in the Seattle Times, showed with unusual clarity, a viewer or reader can walk away with a false impression while being told more or less accurate information.

The story, on the testing program for Bush's National Missile Defense (and beyond) program, came about a month after a key Pacific test. Bushies were desperate to present the test as "successful," in order to prove to Congress and the public that this expensive, destabilizing, unnecessary white elephant could "work." Sure enough, we were told, it did. A bullet hit a bullet. Only after a couple of weeks did it leak out widely that, as the Pentagon sheepishly confirmed, the target successfully struck by the missile had a Global Positioning System attached that told the missile where it was. The test, in other words, was rigged. (In case you're wondering, attacking enemies won't beam the locations of their missiles to us--and even that's a ridiculous statement, since no missile attack is ever likely to happen.)

All of this is now well-established, recorded fact. And, thanks to the Los Angeles Times, the Pentagon has successfully found another target: a memory hole. Yesterday's story, headlined "Reliability concerns to cause repeat of missile-shield test," syndicated to newspapers around the country, begins: WASHINGTON--The head of the Pentagon's missile shield program said yesterday that the Pentagon won't ratchet up difficulty of its tests as rapidly as hoped because the anti-missile system has not proved reliable. Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish said the next test, scheduled for October, essentially will be a repeat of the July 14 exercise in which the system intercepted a mock warhead. It won't use multiple decoys. While the ground-based system successfully found and smashed a dummy warhead last month, it has not been tested against a situation where more than one decoy tries to throw it off course..."

The article goes on in a similar vein, carefully avoiding any of the facts germane to the story. To review, those omitted facts are, in order:

1) The anti-missile system has not proved reliable because it hasn't proved anything other than it can hit a moving target--a technology hunters developed millennia ago.

2) Since it was beaming out a GPS signal to its attackers, the warhead was so "mock" that it bore no resemblance to the actual battlefield task of finding any target, let alone discerning among multiple targets.

3) The system has not been tested against a situation where any missile, decoy or real, has tried to throw it off course. That would require not telling the system where it is.

4) If the October test "essentially will be a repeat," it'll be rigged, too. The article is technically true; Kadish, too, is technically telling the truth. But both strain to give the impression that the system is much further along than it actually is, and that the July test actually proved something. It isn't, it didn't, we were lied to, and it happens all the time.

Read this morning's paper, and find the examples for yourself.

When our missiles go down the memory hole, I hope they have those little video cameras in the nose. I'd love to see what else is down there.