Writing in the Charlotte Observer on Tuesday, former Philadelphia Inquirer editor Walker Lundy urges readers to demand that their newspapers “raise hell.”
I wholeheartedly support a call for newspapers to shed their wimpishness, but after reading Lundy’s column I think what he really means is newspapers should raise more hell with Republicans and conservatives.
Here’s Lundy on the subject:
Today, newspapers are more disinclined than at any time in my memory to “print the news and raise hell.” … As a result, too many Americans are uninformed or misinformed. And that is a threat to democracy. Don’t believe me? Remember how long it took a majority of Americans to figure out the falsity of the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq was involved in 9-11?
Did he say misinformed? Big time journalists, one would think, should be able to make a distinction between these two statements: “Iraq was involved in 9/11” and “Iraq had connections to al Qaeda.” But if Lundy, who chose to retire here in red North Carolina, is representative of his former profession, the answer is, sadly, they can’t.
The mainstream media has fogged this up from the beginning, and one can only conclude it has been done intentionally. Just as “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” became “Bush said Iraq bought yellowcake from Niger” and conclusions based on faulty intelligence about WMD became lying, administration claims of Iraq’s al Qaeda connection became claims of 9/11 complicity by Saddam.
It could be that Lundy is simply repeating what his own newspaper reported. A lot of people did. But when you try to pin down any statement by “the Administration” alleging a Saddam-9/11 connection, all you get is, “Well, they might as well have said as much.”
It’s usually Vice President Dick Cheney who is accused of making the claim, but did he? His comments were often misrepresented or misinterpreted, as in this case in The Boston Globe:
WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney, anxious to defend the White House foreign policy amid ongoing violence in Iraq, stunned intelligence analysts and even members of his own administration this week by failing to dismiss a widely discredited claim: that Saddam Hussein might have played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks.
But what, exactly, did Cheney say? In the Globe‘s own words:
But Cheney left that possibility wide open in a nationally televised interview two days ago, claiming that the administration is learning “more and more” about connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq before the Sept. 11 attacks. The statement surprised some analysts and officials who have reviewed intelligence reports from Iraq.
Having failed to show Cheney or anyone in the administration actually claimed Saddam was connected to 9/11, the media began using what the administration had maintained all along — that Iraq had connections to al Qaeda before 9/11 — as evidence of its having said there were Iraq connections to 9/11 itself.
So, from the horse’s mouth, in an interview with Tony Snow in March 2006:
SNOW: I want to be clear because I’ve heard you say this, and I’ve heard the President say it, but I want you to say it for my listeners, which is that the White House has never argued that Saddam was directly involved in September 11th, correct?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: That’s correct. We had one report early on from another intelligence service that suggested that the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, had met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, Czechoslovakia. And that reporting waxed and waned where the degree of confidence in it, and so forth, has been pretty well knocked down now at this stage, that that meeting ever took place. So we’ve never made the case, or argued the case that somehow Osama bin Laden [sic] was directly involved in 9/11. That evidence has never been forthcoming. But there — that’s a separate proposition from the question of whether or not there was some kind of a relationship between the Iraqi government, Iraqi intelligence services and the al Qaeda organization.
It’s that “separate proposition” that seems to hang up journalists. It’s a hard concept, I know. And while those on the fringes, their faculties clouded by Bush hatred, might be forgiven for failing to grasp it, in my view veteran scribes (even if retired) have no such excuse.
Jon Ham is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of its newspaper, Carolina Journal.