Posted on April 23, 2007
On April 29, 2006, a white, middle-aged man gave an address at a presidential function in a Washington, DC, hotel. Seems normal enough, for such men do such things every day.
But this particular night was different — that man was Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, and the presidential function was the White House Correspondents Association dinner.
Colbert’s address has become an artifact of lore. Delivered to a room filled with administration and media members for what was to be a light-hearted evening, Colbert delivered a humorously potent indictment of both President Bush and the American press for their mutual deficiencies over the past five years.
The speech has gone down in history as a “roast” of President Bush. This is unfortunate, for the points made by Colbert in this rhetorical gem are far deeper than that. President Bush did receive the lion’s share of the critique, but the media walked away equally scathed for their blatant failures as the “fourth branch” of government in the wake of Sept. 11. As Colbert said, “Over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming — we Americans didn’t want to know and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.”
Times now aren’t so good: we are a half-decade into an open Middle-Eastern conflict, thousands of Americans are dead, millions of Iraqis have been displaced and the consensus is that we invaded Iraq over a series of outright lies and foolish mistakes.
But this Wednesday, it will no longer be the comedians proving the point. This Wednesday at 9:00 p.m., PBS will be airing the damning 90-minute documentary “Buying the War,” which chronicles the utter failure of the media leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The documentary stands apart from the chorus of criticism because of the numerous interviews, with the likes of Tim Russert, Walter Pincus and Dan Rather all confessing at Moyer’s behest.
As Moyers argues, “the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses,” though precious few of the media figures interviewed were willing to accept culpability for their inaction.
Why in the world was the privately-owned, powerful American media so willing to play “1984” at the expense of the truth, and ultimately, American and Iraqi lives? Blame the “patriotism police,” according to Walter Isaccson of CNN. “We didn’t question our sources enough,” Isaacson said, “…[because] there were big people in corporations calling up and saying, ‘You’re being anti-American here.’” Phil Donahue of MSNBC stated he was forbidden from featuring war dissenters without twice as many supporters on his talk show.
But the press still has blood on its hands. Tim Russert of NBC, for example, could only mutter incoherencies when Moyers reminded him that, of the 414 Iraq stories featured on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news shows in the six months before the war, almost all relied upon the executive branch of government as their single source, a grievous sin of omission in journalism.
We can clearly no longer trust the American government; President Bush could say the sky is blue, and it would be the height of stupidity not to double-check the fact with Congress and our allies. But without a trustworthy media, we are literally flying blind, unable to gain the requisite information to make relevant decisions regarding the future of this failed war or this failed presidency.
Stephen Colbert was not invited back to this year’s White House Correspondents Association dinner. Decidedly inoffensive comedian Rich Little, who self-identifies not as “a political satirist, just an entertainer,” did not rock the Titanic the president and the press are sailing through a sea of denial. Their ship is sinking, but the band is still playing. Wednesday’s documentary gives the rest of us a chance to move for the life rafts.
Brian Goodman is a senior communications major.
