The REAL Iraq Scandal: And it isn’t what you think!
The media had a field day with alleged prison abuse by American and allied troops in Iraq. Predictably, leftist politicians used the unpleasant images of Iraqi prisoners to denounce the war in Iraq. The abuse, we were told, was systemic. The administration, we were told, was culpable. America, we were told, is the bad guy – and there’s proof!
The denunciation extended to America’s allies. The Mirror, an English newspaper, published photos of British troops allegedly abusing Iraqi inmates. But the proof, as it was called, was far from legitimate. The Mirror was forced to print a retraction, because it turned out the photos were staged, filmed in London and those pictured were neither Iraqis, nor British soldiers. The paper’s retraction was telling, claiming it was the “victim” of a “hoax”. Yet, the editor of the paper admittedly knew the photos were questionable when he splashed them on the front page.
The situation is similar to CBS’ recent Bush incident, where the network aired a story on George Bush, basing its critical reporting on obviously forged documents. For a week, Dan Rather and “60 Minutes” insisted the fake memos were real. Eventually, Rather apologized and admitted the memos were not all they seemed to be – but like the Mirror, CBS’ apology is telling. Rather admitted no political agenda, no ideological bent – his claim was that the only error the network made was rushing to get the story out quick. Thus, CBS was portrayed as the victim of unnecessarily intense criticism, for doing what “everyone else” did. This is similar to the Mirror claiming it was the “victim” of a hoax. The reality is that the only thing the leftist media is a victim of --- in the U.S. or abroad – is its own ideology. It is not a “hoax” if one is willingly hoodwinked. The Mirror, like CBS, wanted the fake evidence to be real. It wanted to indict president Bush, and the war, and America and Western civilization. If it had to lie, so what?
The real victims of these “hoaxes” are the citizens who are mislead – and those who are slandered – by the fake evidence and lies. This is no more true than with the Iraq Prison Scandal.
This is a classic case – perhaps THE classic case – of the media manufacturing a scandal. Most scandals involve some public curiosity or outcry, some desire by readers to learn what happened. The Iraqi prison abuse scandal was created by the press, not to feed any public curiosity, nor to thrash unpopular politicians in the public sphere, but simply to satisfy the media’s own desire to denounce the U.S. An otherwise insignificant handful of incidents were used to tar the entire war effort. The media created a demand for the “scandal”, kept it on the front page for months, and employed increasingly prejudicial images designed to play the emotions of readers.
The real scandal is that while the media was busy bashing the U.S., they were virtually silent about the treatment of captured Americans by terrorists, who were beheading U.S. soldiers and contractors during this time. The murder of Nick Berg received news coverage for approximately two days. The “prison scandal” was on the front page for two months.
Meanwhile, the newspapers were preaching to the choir. It is telling that those who took reports of the “scandal” to be an indictment of the war, and America, were the people who had been opposed to the war at the outset A real “scandal” – some improper, illegal, or outrageous act – that is uncovered by the press will spur outrage across party and ideological lines. While the conduct portrayed in the pictures is definitely outrageous, it was dealt with and it is not representative of either America, nor American soldiers. This stands in marked contrast to the barbarity of the enemy, which was more or less whitewashed during the scandal coverage: the murders of captured U.S. troops and civilians IS typical of who we are fighting. Yet, while focusing on the “scandal” the media was largely silent about the real outrage – the beheading of innocent Americans.
The real scandal is not that the media turned its front pages into a bash-America fest. The real scandal is that the murders the media ignored whilst hyping the alleged prison abuse were to some degree incited by the hype surrounding the “scandal”. Berg’s killers stated they killed him in retaliation for the “prison abuse”. This is not to say that the enemy would have remained harmless unless incited. But the media had to know that these already violent and irrational religionists would be emboldened with even more self-righteousness when they are shown yet another example of “evil America”.
Since then, the media has abandoned the “scandal” to use another method – hyping the beheadings and murders as a sign that America is losing the war, while at the same time denouncing any attempts to root out the terrorists as likely to incite more anti-American violence. The media has gone from manufacturing a scandal, to manufacturing a catch-22. But that scandal remains one of the media’s darkest hours.
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