Media Black Out Downing Street Minutes

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Tue May-31-05 11:13 AM
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Media Black Out Downing Street Minutes

Norman Solomon: "Big media outlets shun the idea that the president might really be a war criminal."

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http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=537

Media Black Out Downing Street Minutes

David Swanson

May 31, 2005

<snip>
In order to gauge the sort of reporting I ought to find on this topic, I did a couple of quick searches for major news stories of vital importance to our democracy. I searched, between May 1 and May 30 in English language media, for "Michael Jackson" and for "Star Wars." For each of those searches, however, I found over 1,000 articles, which is too many for Nexis to display.

I was sure I would run into the same problem when I searched for "Downing Street Memo." To make that even more likely, I searched for "Downing Street Memo" OR "Downing Street Minutes" OR "Bush lied." Amazingly, however, I found only 123 articles in May in English-language media. Even odder was the nature of those articles. Unlike most searches I've done in Nexis, this one found a large percentage of articles (about half) that were not articles at all. They were letters to the editor. Of these letters, 39 informed the public about the Downing Street Minutes, the majority of these also complaining about a lack of media coverage. One letter argued against paying any attention to the Minutes. Meanwhile, 23 letters included the phrase "Bush lied," 21 of them arguing that he had lied about Iraq, two suggesting that he had lied about something else. (There's some overlap in these numbers, in that some letters cited both the Downing Street Minutes and Bush lying.)

But letters weren't the only non-article articles found in this search. Three of the articles were just lists of articles. Three more were identical copies of the same transcript from a White House briefing at which the White House Press Secretary was asked about the Downing Street Minutes. Another three were guest columns about the lack of media coverage. Yet another three were columns by newspapers' in-house columnists about the lack of media coverage. Four were the transcripts of chats on washingtonpost.com in which people asked about the Downing Street Minutes and the Post employees quickly dismissed the subject. And one was a press release put out by a member of the www.AfterDowningStreet.org coalition.

Of course, after eliminating all of those, the rest must have been substantive articles reporting on this important document and what it means for the Bush Administration's record of veracity – right? Well, wait a minute. One was a transcript from Fox in which a guest devoted part of a sentence to the Downing Street Minutes. Two were transcripts from CNN devoting a combined total of two sentences to the matter. One was a transcript in which the actor Tim Robbins complained on "Hard Ball" about the lack of media coverage. And another was from The O'Reilly Factor on Fox, in which host Bill O'Reilly read and lied in response to a viewer's letter thus:
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