Iran: Mainstream media dutifully playing its part

international | arts and media | other press Wednesday February 21, 2007 21:01 by Miriam Cotton - MediaBite mcotton at mediabite dot org

Media Lens shows how some lessons are never learned

After much breast-beating and declarations of firm intentions never to be duped again about reasons for going to war, the UK media is acting as if Iraq/WMD lies had never been told. Media Lens offer a succinct analysis of convenient MSM amnesia as a necessary precondition of yet another illegal and concocted war of aggression on an innocent country.

The Art Of Instant Forgetting

Media corporations have an awesome ability to fail to learn even the most obvious lessons from the recent past. In discussing allegations made against Iran in 2007, for example, it is often as though Iraq 2002-2003 never happened. The same journalists receiving the same propaganda from the same government sources respond with the same credulity and the same indifference to the human consequences.

On February 16, the US media watchdog, FAIR, recalled how, in the wake of its disastrous pre-war reporting on Iraq, the New York Times had “implemented new rules governing its use of unnamed sources”. How exasperating, then, that the Times’ lead story on February 10 promoting US government charges against Iran trashed these rules completely. FAIR commented:

“Repeatedly citing the likes of ‘administration officials,’ ‘American intelligence’ and ‘Western officials,’ the article used unnamed sources four times as often as named ones. Only one source in... [the] report challenged the official claims: Iranian United Nations ambassador Javad Zarif, who was allowed a one-sentence denial of Iranian government involvement.” (Fair Action Alert, ‘NYT Breaks Own Anonymity Rules,’ February 16, 2007; http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3042)

Continued: http://www.medialens.org/