Virtually impossible to publish articles critical of Bush in the corporate mainstream media, only a handful of liberal journalists had been able to show the president had been caught in numerous lies. Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman, and Richard Cohen addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretended not to notice.

In the one significant effort by a national daily to deal with Bush’s consistent pattern of mendacity, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank was not allowed to publish articles. Instead, the reader merely read innocuous statements abut the president. “Bush’s rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy, “He has “taken some liberties,” “omitted qualifiers,” and “simply outpace(d) the facts.”

Ben Bradlee explained. “Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face. No editor would dare print this version of Nixon's first comments on Watergate for instance. ‘The Watergate break-in involved matters of national security, President Nixon told a national TV audience last night, and for that reason he would be unable to comment on the bizarre burglary. That is a lie.’”

Some reporters prided themselves on conservative political figures who were caught lying. Robert Novak said he “admired” Elliott Abrams for lying to him in a television interview about illegal United States acts of war against Nicaragua, because he agreed with the cause.

But the conservative media were quick to label President Clinton a liar, although his lies were about private matters. “I’d like to be able to tell my children, ‘You should tell the truth,’ ” Stuart Taylor Jr. of the National Journal said on Meet the Press. “I’d like to be able to tell them, ‘You should respect the President.’ And I’d like to be able to tell them both things at the same time.”

Chris Matthews charged, “Clinton lies knowing that you know he's lying. It’s brutal and it subjugates the person who’s being lied to. I resent deeply being constantly lied to.”

George Will went so far as to insist that Clinton’ “calculated, sustained lying has involved an extraordinarily corrupting assault on language, which is the uniquely human capacity that makes persuasion, and hence popular government, possible.” (The Nation, November 25, 2002)

The conservative media also made numerous errors favorable to the Bush administration:

1. “But as U.N. weapons inspectors prepare to return to Iraq for the first time since Saddam kicked them out in 1998, the U.S. faces a delicate balancing act: transforming the international consensus for disarmament into a consensus for war.” (Randall Pinkston, CBS Evening News, November 9, 2002)

United Nations inspectors were never “expelled” or “kicked out” of Iraq. The inspectors, led by Richard Butler, actually left voluntarily, knowing that a U.S. bombing campaign was imminent. This was reported accurately throughout the United States media at the time: “Butler ordered his inspectors to evacuate Baghdad, in anticipation of a military attack, on Tuesday night.” (Washington Post, December 18, 1998)

2. “The last weapons inspectors were pulled out of Iraq nearly four years ago. Baghdad charged that there were spies on the team, and the United States complained that Iraq was using the accusation as an excuse to obstruct the inspectors. After the team withdrew, the U.S. and Britain waged a four-day bombing campaign.” (Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2002)

Reports of the misuse of the inspectors for spying were made in early 1999 by some of the leading United States newspapers. (FAIR Action Alert, September 24, 2002; http://www.fair.org/activism/unscom-history.html ) These papers reported as fact that “American spies had worked undercover on teams of United Nations arms inspectors” (New York Times, January 7, 1999) in order to “eavesdrop on the Iraqi military without the knowledge of the U.N. agency.” (Washington Post, March 2, 1999) as part of “an ambitious spying operation designed to penetrate Iraq’s intelligence apparatus and track the movement of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.” (Boston Globe, January 6, 1999).

3. “Many (in Iraq), of course, are bitter over the 12-year-long U.S.-supported embargo, which Baghdad claims has led to thousands of infants and elderly people dying from preventable diseases.” (Time, November 25, 2002)

There were detailed reports on the deadly effects of sanctions that came from respected international health organizations and public health experts, not from the Iraqi government. For example, UNICEF published a report in August 1999 that found that sanctions against Iraq had contributed to the deaths of 500,000 children under five. Richard Garfield, a public health specialist at Columbia University, estimated that 350,000 children had died as a result of sanctions and the lingering effects of the 1991 Gulf. (http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011203&s=cortright; War (The Nation, December 6, 2001)

“The Pentagon points out, the Bush administration points out very, very strongly that the Iraqi regime itself is to blame for all of the problems. If they simply complied with the U.N. Security Council resolutions and disarm, there would be no sanctions, there would be no problem getting medical supplies, doctor, pediatricians, to all parts of Iraq.” (Wolf Blitzer, CNN, November 7, 2002)

There was no evidence to suggest that sanctions against Iraq would automatically be lifted if the country disarmed. In 1991, the elder Bush declared, shortly after the sanctions were imposed, “My view is we don’t want to lift these sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.” His secretary of state James Baker concurred: “We are not interested in seeing a relaxation of sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.”

President Clinton said that his policy toward Iraq was exactly the same as his predecessor’s. His secretary of state Madeleine Albright stated in her first major foreign policy address in 1997: “We do not agree with the nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted. Our view, which is unshakable, is that Iraq must prove its peaceful intentions. ... And the evidence is overwhelming that Saddam Hussein’s intentions will never be peaceful.” (http://www.accuracy.org/iraq.htm; Institute for Public Accuracy, November 13, 1998)