Paul Krugman cuts to the chase on the administration's newest propaganda campaign: the President's latest more-of-the-same-empty-platitudes Iraq speech and the newly released "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq", an embarrassingly long and misleading document filled with typical "fuzzy math and fuzzy facts", are an important test of the media's ethics and cedibility: will they report the inconsistencies and expose the manipulation and misinformation? Or will they once again fail to check the facts?
KRUGMAN: "The point isn't just that the administration is trying, yet again, to deceive the public. It's the fact that this attempt at deception shows such contempt - contempt for the public, and especially contempt for the news media. And why not? The truth is that the level of misrepresentation in this new document is no worse than that in a typical speech by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet for much of the past five years, many major news organizations failed to provide the public with effective fact-checking.
So Mr. Bush's new public relations offensive on Iraq is a test. Are the news media still too cowed, too addicted to articles that contain little more than dueling quotes to tell the public when the administration is saying things that aren't true? Or has the worm finally turned?
There have been encouraging signs, notably a thorough front-page fact-checking article - which even included charts showing the stagnation of oil production and electricity generation! - in USA Today. But the next few days will tell."
CLICK HERE: Read Krugman's whole article on Truthout
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