If We Ignore It, It'll Go Away

I recommend this great Rick Perlstein post about a panel at the Take Back America conference on the media and the blogosphere. Pay particular attention to this exchange:

The q&a session illustrated the point. Someone asked the Washington reporters on the panel whether the sense in their newsrooms was that, as the International Atomic Energy Agency maintains, that Iran is nowhere close to having nuclear weapons, and may in fact not even be attempting to get nuclear waeapons. Or did their newsrooms trust the administration, which makes the opposite claim? Schuster affirmed that there was a "great deal of skepticism among reporters" on the administration's Iran claims. He puffed up a little with pride, and said that's why you don't see many reports on Iran these days: because they've evaluated the administration's claims and found them wanting - undeserving of attention.

Froomkin got the last word. He said: that's precisely the point. You don't respond to administration lies about Iran by not running Iran stories. You respond to it by doing stories - about adminstration lies about Iran.

Sometimes it takes a blogger to see what's in front of a mainstream reporter's face.

The White House and the conservative noise machine has PLENTY of outlets to make their case for bombing Iran. When faced with the conservative side of the argument and... nothing, who's side do you think the public will take? This is why so many Americans still think Saddam had something to do with 9/11 - because the media didn't report the story very hard, and the right did, and a busy populace had an unbalanced playing field from which to draw conclusions.

And so we get reports about the internal politics in the White House of the Iran debate, we hear about the showdown between neocons and realists within the Administration, but we don't get anything but he-said she-said numbers when it comes to Iran's actual enrichment capability, we don't hear anything about the horrifying consequences of bombing a country where you don't know the targets, where the infrastructure could malfunction in the nuclear facility upon impact and kill millions of innocents from radioactive fallout, what the counterstrike would be to our 200,000+ Americans stationed in bordering countries, what the impact would be on democracy promotion and actually fighting global fundamentalist Islam. Because a few reporters and editors have "figured it out," they're not letting their readership figure it out, and instead are making more likely this prediction:

The U.S. is badgering allies on the UN Security Council to impose a third round of sanctions on Iran for failing to comply with the International Atomic Energy Agency on its nuclear program. "Look, the third round of sanctions is critical," a State Department official said. "If we're up there begging and bargaining and negotiating over the graduation of what are largely ineffective sanctions, then fine, time is not long..."

But on a June 6th visit to Washington for the US-Israel Strategic Dialogue, the Israeli team leader, Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, said he and Secretary of State Rice agreed to review sanctions' effectiveness at the end of the year. "Sanctions must be strong enough to bring about change in the Iranians by the end of 2007," Mofaz was cited by JTA.

So a new timeline would appear to be emerging: if the current route of multilateral diplomacy and economic pressure hasn't achieved a change in Iran's behavior on the nuclear front by the end of the year, there is likely to be renewed and concerted pressure on the Bush administration to contemplate military action.

This is coming right down the road, the media knows it, and they won't bother to rebut the spin with the truth until it's too late. This is why alternative media has bubbled up, to fill these desperate needs for information before the spin machine starts going bonkers.

Atrios has more on this panel, including the fiction that journalists can point to ONE act of good journalism and declare the matter closed. The real problem, as Duncan points out, is the blurring of lines between news and punditry, and the generation of "conventional Beltway wisdom" which then gets dispensed into news stories and becomes the calcified Very Serious Truth which you cannot refute.

UPDATE: My point made by K-Drum. Apparently almost nobody is reporting about the fact that Rudy Giuliani, current front-runner for the GOP nomination and self-proclaimed "Hero in the fight against terror," walked off the Iraq Study Group because he was too busy getting paid to make speeches.

I'm keenly aware that an awful lot of blog criticism of the mainstream media is basically just partisan sniping. But is this seriously not considered news? A guy who's running for president based on his reputation as a hero of 9/11 was given a seat on the highest profile group ever created to investigate a way forward in Iraq, but he decided it wasn't worth his time? He blew off James Baker and Lee Hamilton so that he could give speeches in South Korea and attend fundraisers for Ralph Reed in Atlanta? And the consensus reaction is a big yawn?

But John Edwards got a haircut and it leads the news.