Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [35]
And just what exactly was the reason for the war with Iraq? We were so thoroughly whopperized that polls showed that half of all Americans wrongly thought that Iraqis were on the September 11 planes, and, at one point, nearly half believed that the U.S. had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, when no such discovery had been made. One-quarter of those surveyed thought that Saddam had unleashed a chemical or biological attack against “coalition” forces, which also hadn’t happened.
The widespread misconceptions were understandable. It was almost impossible to hear the perspective of anyone who questioned or opposed the Bush administration’s rationale for rushing to war on American television.
The media watchdog group FAIR studied the evening newscasts of six U.S. television networks and news channels for three weeks, starting on March 20, 2003—the day after the U.S. bombing of Iraq began. The study examined the affiliations and views of more than 1,600 sources who appeared on-camera in stories about Iraq. The results were hardly a surprise:
• Viewers were 25 times more likely to see a pro-war U.S. source than someone with an anti-war point of view.
• Military sources were featured twice as frequently as civilians.
• Only 4 percent of sources appearing during the three weeks were affiliated with universities, think tanks or non-governmental organizations.
• Of a total of 840 U.S. sources who were current or former government or military officials, only four were identified as opposing the war.
• The few appearances by people with anti-war viewpoints were consistently limited to one-sentence sound bites, usually from unidentified participants in on-the-street interviews. Not a single one of the six telecasts studied conducted a sit-down interview with anyone who opposed the war.
In some cases, journalists freely confessed to a startling lack of objectivity. The FAIR study quoted CBS News anchor Dan Rather during an appearance with Larry King on CNN: “Look, I’m an American. I never tried to kid anybody that I’m some internationalist or something. And when my country is at war, I want my country to win, whatever the definition of ‘win’ may be. Now, I can’t and don’t argue that that is coverage without a prejudice. About that I am prejudiced.”
During the three-week study period, FAIR found only one “anti-war” sound bite on Rather’s CBS Evening News. It was made by, um, me, at the Academy Awards, talking about the “fictitious war” waged by our “fictitious president.”
Over at Fox News, Neil Cavuto had this to say on-air in response to a critic: “There is nothing wrong with taking sides here. . . . You see no difference between a government that oppresses people and one that does not, but I do.”
MSNBC demonstrated its patriotism with “America’s Bravest”—a billboard of photographs of military personnel fighting in the war, sent for display by their friends and families. And Brian Williams, of NBC and MSNBC, said this about the killing of Iraqi civilians: “Civilians used to be intentional military targets. The fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo in World War II were meant to kill civilians and then terrorize survivors. Here we’ve seen the opposite happen.”
(The Army recently signed a $470 million contract with Microsoft, which is co-owner of MSNBC along with NBC. NBC is in turn owned by General Electric, one of the nation’s largest defense contractors. GE’s military aircraft engine contracts run in the billions. But the FAIR study found that NBC actually featured more dissenting viewpoints about the war—a whopping 1 percent more—than any of the other U.S. networks.)
Here are just a few more of the many whoppers provided by American networks and newspapers about the war in Iraq:
ABC reported on April 26, 2003, that “the U.S. military has found a weapons site 130 miles northwest of Baghdad that has initially tested positive for chemical agents. Among the materials there, fourteen fifty-five-gallon