Pacific Views

Damned Lies, Your Sunday Edition

You know, it'd be nice if the press could on occasion take a day off from perpetrating lies on the public. It's like they're trying to make all of us feel like we need Valium, or something.

I'm sure that even people not directly aware of this have the feeling it's happening. Fnord. That even if they don't have time to track it down, it itches at the back of their minds. Like an errand you forgot. Like that thing your friend asked you to tell your other friend, but then you open your mouth to repeat it and POOF, gone. Like that. A persistent, niggling irritation.

For our appetizer, MSNBC puts together a history of Iran that leaves out the U.S.-backed 1953 coup against the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq. As I've said many times on these pages, demonstrators in Iran can still sometimes be seen carrying his picture on marches. It's nearly the only publically acceptable plea for greater democracy, because Mossadeq is considered emblematic of Iran's former subjugation to the West. He is raised by the ayatollahs, alongside his U.S.-backed replacement, the Shah, as the specter of America's true intentions towards Iran. Nothing, absolutely nothing, about U.S.-Iranian relations can be properly understood without at least a passing knowledge of this event. It would be much like studying U.S.-British relations early in our nation's history and leaving out the war of 1812, or that America used to be a British colony.

Next, in a case of outright propaganda and news suppression, Atrios catches the Washington Post redacting key sentences from the online version of a story about Iraq indicating that, far from only being made in Iran, U.S. forces discovered an Iraqi factory that manufactured Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFPs). EFPs, alleged to come from Iran, have done a lot of damage to U.S. troops as roadside bombs. Previous reports on this, where U.S. officials dragged out pictures of supposedly Iranian EFPs, turned out to have been the most transparent type of propaganda, lots of linked supporting material if you click through to the whole thing:

... For one thing, the lettering and numbering isn't in Farsi (the language used by Iranians); for another, the UK uses 81MM shells, and Iran would be much more likely to use Soviet-style 82MM shells. ...

And finally, the lies about Al Gore, and the environmental science realism that he's become the public champion of, continue apace. This time, the notorious wingnuts at the Wall Street Journal's editorial board are doing the smearing and a rapid response team member at one of the Draft Gore sites has taken on the responsibility of answering them. The WSJ would have us believe that science is just a "social invention", which is only true in the limited sense of referring to the structures for its furtherance, but not remotely the way to discuss the verifiable and peer-reviewed data so discovered. Bob Somerby's recent flaying of a C-SPAN call-in program where it was considered a serious debate topic to posit that Mars is warming, as well as other planets, highlights the state of our current media disinformation campaign on global warming like nothing else. Though Somerby doesn't say so explicitly that I noticed, that particular line of bunkum is premised on the idea that catastrophic climate disruption is being caused by sunspots.

Gods have mercy on us all.

Posted by natasha at April 7, 2007 10:37 AM | Propaganda | Technorati links |