The Fox of war

[BR_Parkway]

The Bush administration's case for invading Iraq may have been riddled with unreliable claims, but that didn't stop White House-friendly Fox News from pumping it into America's living rooms.

-------

"Of course, Fox and the White House had forged their nexus well before Iraq. Immediately after 9/11, for instance, Fox chief Roger Ailes (a former Republican Party media consultant) wrote a confidential memo to President Bush saying that America wanted him to "use the harshest measures possible" in the war on terrorism. On the eve of the Iraq invasion, the Washington Post reported that neoconservative Fox contributors, such as Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, were "well wired" into the White House, meeting periodically with top administration national security officials and "huddling privately" every three months with Karl Rove, who was urging Republicans to seek maximum political advantage from a war in Iraq. Fox News became the White House's most reliable amplifier -- claims went from the podium, into the news scripts, and out to the American public as fact."


Salon does a wonderful report on how Fox and Hannity ignored, misplaced the blame and was an "enthusiastic participant in the White House's campaign of disinformation leading the country into war"

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/03/30/fox_news/index.html Maybe other sources will keep repeating this.

[0007]

1. Anyone watching FAUX News on a regular basic is hard up for entertainment

[coltman]

2. we get it force fed...

at the G.M. foundry I work in.Really pisses me when my fellow auto workers yell at me for turning it off.

[Kolesar]

3. Knight-Ridder Newspapers report on Iraqi expat misinformation campaign

--0--
Iraqi exile group fed false information to news media

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/8194211.htm
By Jonathan S. Landay and Tish Wells

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed much of the same information to leading newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia.

A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the INC's Information Collection Program, a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq.

The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding biological and chemical weapons.

Feeding the information to the news media, as well as to selected administration officials and members of Congress, helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons programs and links to bin Laden. In fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors, weren't confirmed by other intelligence and were hotly disputed by intelligence professionals at the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department.


....read on at the link for the unsubstantiated claims by Iraqis that got us into that intractable quagmire....

[EdGy]

4. state propaganda

Fox is nothing but the propaganda arm of the extremists who control the Republican Party.

Watching Fox, you get a sense of what the pro-regime media was like in Milosevic's Serbia. It was EXACTLY the same, incredibly, frighteningly the same. I've seen both and they are identical in tone, format and purpose: disseminating the lies of an authoritarian regime that is afraid of the truth.

[Kolesar]

6. it is like Soviet propaganda

I reminds me of the accounts in the Gulag Archipelago and other books I read by Solzhenitsyn.

[bryant69]

5. SOrt of an info dump of an article

rather than a more well written expose, it's just a collection of comparisons between Fox assertions and reality. But there's nothing wrong with that; there have been a lot of them, and it's easy enough to forget them all.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com