This article mentions several falsehoods and inaccurate statements have been widely reported in the media about recent events, such as the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing and related events. I am reluctant to repeat them here, because studies have shown that refuting a falsehood can help spread it even more. Later on, people can remember the interesting falsehood, and forget the fact that it was false. See the original article, please.
What makes the problem worse is that once most people have a belief, they are extremely reistant to changing it.
http://salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/12/media
Tuesday, Jan 12, 2010 07:13 EST
By Glenn Greenwald
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As I documented two weeks ago, government claims about which "top Al Qaeda fighters" were killed by our airstrikes turn out to be untrue far more often than not, yet are always mindlessly featured by our media, ensuring little questioning of those actions; and now, at least two of the three Top Terrorists claimed to have been killed by our recent airstrikes in Yemen -- and possibly all three -- are quite likely alive.
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Aside from falsity -- and the fact that they become irreversibly lodged in our political culture as fact -- what do all of these deceitful reports have in common? They're all the by-product of granting anonymity to people and then repeating what they claim as fact, with the falsehood-disseminators protected by "journalists" from any and all accountability for their falsehoods. It's exactly the same process that caused our leading media outlets to tell Americans about Iraq's massive WMD program and Al Qaeda connections; Jessica Lynch's heroic firefight with inhumane Iraqi devils and her "rescue" by our Marines; Pat Tillman's death at the hands of Al Qaeda monsters; and government tests that "confirmed" the presence of bentonite in the anthrax used to attack the U.S., which meant it was likely that Saddam was behind the attacks.
Unjustified anonymity -- especially when mindlessly repeating what shielded government sources claim in secret -- is the single greatest enabler of false and deceitful "reporting." Despite (or, really, because of) its unparalelled record of producing lies, it will never stop, because agreeing to it is how "journalists" end up being selected as favored message-carrying servants for the powerful. This falsehood-producing method isn't ancillary to American journalism but central to it; the book which is occupying the attention of America's political and media class is based exclusively on unattributed, shielded sources, and that seems to bother none of them.
None of the falsehoods documented here will ever lead to any accountability, because the identity of the falsehood-producers will be shielded by their loyal journalist-servants, and the journalists themselves will simply claim that they wrote what they did because their hidden sources told them to. That's not only the effect, but the intent, of the central method of American journalism: to disseminate outright falsehoods to the American public and ensure that neither the liars nor their loyal message-carriers ever face any consequences or even reputational loss. Anonymity is so common that "reporters" barely even bother any longer to explain why it's justified, notwithstanding numerous policies of media outlets requiring exactly that explanation. As the use of anonymity has escalated rapidly, so, too, has the pervasiveness of outright falsehoods and the inherent unreliability of much of what the American media "reports." Lying is so much easier -- and thus so much more common -- when you get to do it while remaining hidden.
(1) I've been writing frequently of late about the perception disparities between Americans and the Muslim world due not to their propaganda-based ignorance but to our own. Here's a somewhat old but highly illustrative example: in 1996, then-Secretary-of-State Madeleine Albright was asked by 60 Minutes about the fact that American sanctions on Iraq resulted in the deaths of "a half million children" -- more than the number killed at Hiroshima -- and Albright dismissively replied: "We think the price is worth it." At the time, FAIR documented that while the number of dead Iraqi children -- as well as Albright's quote -- was known far and wide in predominantly Muslim countries, it was almost completely blacked-out in the American press. How many Americans know that our sanctions resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children?
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From comments to the original article :
"GE owns NBC/MSNBC, Disney owns ABC/ESPN, Sony(?) owns CBS, and Murdoch (Arrgh, Matey!) owns Fox and the NY Post."
Comcast actually owns NBC-Uni now, but I believe GE retains a 49% stake. From to worse, so it hardly undermines your point. I just like to bring it up often so that people know what they're seeing when they get hit with 500 "Broadband for America" commercials during any of MSNBC's news/opinion programs.
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