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sien

You hire Judith Miller to write about WMDs.

Then get 'quality' news to publish it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller

The cost of the NYT's 'disinformation' about Iraq was a war that cost hundreds of billions and thousands of lives.

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It's quite unfair to compare misinformation campaigns orchestrated by the whole US government and it's intelligence agencies, as was the case with Iraq's WMDs, to online propaganda organized by private individuals to the benefit of various political candidates or their own online circulation.

What happened with Iraq was not just fake news, it was fake governing, it was another order of magnitude. Miller and the NYT were just some of the many useful idiots.

Nah, the backlash we're seeing against mainstream media these days are, I believe, in a large part driven by those reporters that failed to do their due diligence when it came to Iraq. Reporters should expect to be told lies often, when those lies are blindly printed and distributed it does a lot of damage to society's trust. I think with Iraq it went beyond negligence, but likely not at all levels, preferring to hire hawkish reporters is an effective way to keep the train rolling.

That said, singling out NYT as the OP did is sort of hilarious, all the media outlets ran the same terrible stories and often avoided booking guests that would speak against the war.

The definition of lying generally involves intent. Do you think these journalists generally are intending to mislead with statements they know are untrue in the same way the producers of fake news do?

Nobody in this thread suggested that the journalists were lying, just that they were terrible at their jobs. They repeated the official line, without questioning the source.

The title of this article and post presents a question. The first comment in this thread appears to be answering that question by blaming it on the NYT.

Right. By blindly parroting the government's line. By failing to do due diligence, or be skeptical of the sources, etc. Those are all different things than lying. They're lapses in professional care, or shortcomings in ability. Straight up lying could also be involved, sure. But lying isn't necessary for blame to be assigned.

I would go so far to say they willingly participated by trading away scrutiny for access.

Saying the NYTimes spread lies (answering the question in the post title) in a context WMD's or other contexts is not the same thing as saying the NYTimes or journalists were/are lying (with intent).

I tend to think intent is an outmoded system of morality. It can be faked easily, even to oneself.

It is always better to judge outcomes. Actions, not words..

Lying, then, should be judged not on level of intent, but on severity. And on this metric, all those reporters involved should feel, and be judged, personally responsible for the deaths in the iraq war and aftermath.

This behaviour covers the whole spectrum from deliberate misinformation to honest belief in the lies they were fed. In between you can find journalists that don't care about the truth but are ready to write anything that pays or ones that would lie for the sake of (in their opinion) a greater good, or ones that would spread lies out of sloppiness or ignorance. This applies to producers of fake news too.

I am not sure anyone should bother finding a proper label for each shade of those lies.

Nah, the backlash we're seeing against mainstream media these days are, I believe, in a large part driven by those reporters that failed to do their due diligence when it came to Iraq.

Except that the “MSM is lying” crowd still overwhelmingly supports W. bush and the Iraq war, and didn’t seem to mind what the media had to say for 8 years of his presidency. This whole thing kicked off under Obama when “alt” news was talking about FEMA internment camps and that kind of madness, and later when Pizzagate and other stories weren’t carried in the mainstream.

If your theory were right, you’d expect the Left to be the ones who rejected the media, but that isn’t what happened.

Edit To be clear, I’m saying that this is less about skepticism (healthy) than rejection of media in favor of preferable narratives. It’s the extension of disliking what science education has to say about evolution and seeking to have Creationism taught in schools. When you can’t beat them, avoid them, craft your own narrative and reject reality.

Much of the left were jaded by Iraq; personally, I am probably stuck for life as an institutional news media skeptic, because it all happened when I was growing up.

The left has been angry with the media forever though. Have you read Manufacturing Consent?

When it comes to the Iraq war everyone was lied to. Certainly war hawks might have been happy, but the majority of Americans on both sides of the aisles dislike unnecessary wars. Honestly, participants in the media and those on this message board are likely to be among the less effected by wars but people from the full political spectrum die in combat.

To clarify, though, I didn't meant to say that the right wouldn't be skeptical of the media, it seems like both sides have been more skeptical of news coverage in general which is (mostly) a good thing.

And I do think a lot of people on the left have been disbursed of their enchantment with the media, there was a strong skew in coverage during the 2016 primaries in the democratic party.

> Certainly war hawks might have been happy, but the majority of Americans on both sides of the aisles dislike unnecessary wars.

It doesn’t matter what they like or dislike, it matters who they vote for. For most of the USA’s history, Americans have consistently voted for national candidates who ended up starting or continuing unnecessary war. This is true for both major parties. The country has been involved in voluntary military conflicts for how many years of its history?

I'll go with twelve.

You'd be off by an order of magnitude.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

As it happens in most things related to media, the left blazed a trail and the right perfected the exploitation techniques.

The internet in the '90s was a fervour of "indie media", "citizen reporting", "the revolution will not be televised", culminating in the Iraq war build-up, which was a watershed of sorts. Now the exact same attitudes are being exploited in a coordinated manner by the right, anti-vaxxers, astroturfers and other special interests.

This is not just a US phenomenon, by the way -- the same can be observed pretty much globally.

Do we have reason to believe that the government knew there were no WMDs?

> Do we have reason to believe that the government knew there were no WMDs?

Yes; many of the specific bases of support they pointed to had been debunked before they were publicized by, among others, UN weapons inspectors. While it's far from proof, that alone is reason to believe that they were knowingly fabricating their claims.

Would you be able to link to a source about the UN weapons inspectors or something similar? All I have is pretty much hearsay and I was young enough when the towers fell that I understood "bad guys did it" but not much more.

I wish I could find a TV interview with a German inspector I watched back then. They got some super secret leads from the CIA, went to the locations and never found anything. The response from the US was to cut them off from information and shout even louder that they had all this bullet-proof information.

Some links: https://www.npr.org/2013/03/19/174708587/u-n-weapons-inspect... https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/meast/iraq-weapons-insp...

Here is something about the Iraq-Al Qaeda link they tried to proof.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_li...

I don't know if Bush and friends really believed their claims but if you looked at it from a neutral point of view it was very clear that they had made up their minds to invade Iraq and desperately tried and failed to find evidence.

You are putting the burden on the wrong shoulders. Cheney et el claimed to have extensive proof, which was later shown to be made up. Then there were things which were debunked even before we started the campaign, such as the aluminum rods which were supposedly for a nuclear reactor.

They didn't know there were none. It's hard to be sure of a negative like that. They knew the chances were too slim to justify a war without a lot of embellishing.

The joke while I was in Iraq was "We know he has WMD's because we have the receipts from the Iran-Iraq war when we gave them to him."... but we mostly knew what and where they were, their lifespan, etc, and that for the most part, "there was no "there" there". A few older things that had been heavily degraded were found.

I'll never forget being handed the same picture C Powell showed at the briefing and told "this is what we are looking for", given how we found out later that was bullshit.

Iraq was for other reasons. WMD was just one piece of how it was "sold".

Nobody with any capacity for critical thought ever believed there were WMDs in Iraq. The government's disinformation campaign was not sophisticated at all. It wasn't the whole government -it was pretty much just Cheney, Bush, and Rice. The NYT reporters weren't useful idiots - they new exactly what they were doing. Selling papers. They pretty much admitted it later https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...

>It's quite unfair to compare misinformation campaigns orchestrated by the whole US government and it's intelligence agencies

I think you're both right and wrong. Wrong because there are still interesting questions about how falsehoods propagate over networks in the case of Iraq and WMD. But right in the sense that there's an underlying structural difference how and why the falsehoods are being generated in one case vs the other.

It feels like you're implying that NYT should be absolved of this. Make no mistake - no one held a gun to their head and made them print those stories.

It's quite unfair to compare misinformation campaigns orchestrated by the whole US government

Oh come on. The NYT et al have not hesitated or been reluctant in any way to criticise the current US government. They equally gleefully supported the WMD story because it suited them to do so, pandered to them feeling important.

"Credible estimates of Iraq War casualties range from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 (per the Iraq Family Health Survey) to 461,000 total deaths as of June 2011 (per PLOS Medicine 2013), over 60% of them violent."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

"Other disputed estimates, such as the 2006 Lancet study and the 2007 Opinion Research Business (ORB) survey—which likely overestimate mortality—put the numbers as high as 655,000 total deaths as of June 2006 (over 90% of them violent) and 1.2 million violent deaths as of August 2007 respectively. Meanwhile, body counts—which likely underestimate mortality—put the numbers as low as 110,000 violent deaths as of April 2009"

The Wikipedia summary needs editing. The paragraph has a lot of weasel words. Who decides what is credible? Who decides what is likely an underestimate? And AFAIK, all the estimates are disputed - yet someone will get the impression that the Lancet ones are the disputed ones and not the PLOS one.

> The cost of the NYT's 'disinformation' about Iraq was a war that cost hundreds of billions and thousands of lives.

Are you saying that had the NYT reported things differently the Iraq war wouldn't have happened? That seems unreasonably strong because it implies that the New York Times had a greater responsibility for the war than did the president and congress.

Perhaps if the entire mainstream media had reported things differently (instead of seemingly all of them being blindly in favor of it), then yes, maybe it wouldn't have happened. That is assuming of course that the US government actually cares what the public thinks when powerful government officials want war.

Perhaps you're right, but at the time, most mainstream media was simply reporting on what the executive branch had already claimed was proven: Saddam had WMDs. At the time, there were no government/intelligence officials saying otherwise. The media had no strong reason to doubt the government's claims before the war started, as well as no way to validate or disprove the claims. And it's not like it would've been the most shocking revelation in the world if it were true; Saddam was a despot who had undoubtedly heavily researched, developed, and used WMDs in the past and had motive to continue stockpiling WMDs.

The media certainly should have been more skeptical and critical of the government, but I'd say at that early stage, the blame mostly falls on Bush and his advisors. If you were working at one of these news outlets at that time, I bet you would have reported it similar to the rest of the mainstream media, too.

The media is not supposed to simply parrot government talking points, at least not in a free society.

Even if Saddam did have WMDs, so what? So does North Korea and other hostile regimes, and so does the US. Couldn't the media have questioned whether or not that was a valid excuse for war?

That's the type of thing Phil Donahue of MSNBC did, and his questioning of the war got him fired.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program

History is important, too, but apparently not to them. Was it ever mentioned in the mainstream media that the US itself had provided billions of dollars in military equipment and support to Saddam, including dual use technologies used for chemical and biological weapons?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Ir...

"You know we armed Iraq...during the Gulf War those intelligence reports would come out"--

'Iraq, incredible weapons! Incredible weapons!'

"...How do you know that?"

'Well...we looked at the receipts. But as soon as that check clears we're going in!'

-Bill Hicks

https://youtu.be/MyG2c-Wddzo

You're right, but I think hindsight is 20/20. This was one of the events that let us know to be much more skeptical of government intelligence and military claims.

It wasn't like they learned their lesson, either. They've continued to staff up with morons and to report a lot of falsehoods and distractions in the years since the Iraq War days.

It's treasonous not to trust the 17 intelligence agencies.

Your irony is too subtle.

I can't tell if you're just using sarcasm here, but there's nothing "treasonous" about not trusting intelligence agencies that throughout history have not been very trustworthy.

You should also stop using "treason" incorrectly. Here [1] is a great debate between Glenn Greenwald and James Risen where Glenn breaks down how important it is to not use Treason in an incorrect manner, and explains (sourced) exactly what Treason is defined as under US law with examples throughout history.

[1] https://youtu.be/LsY70_uIXNc?t=5m34s

The missed penny is what notable persons have long and loudly proclaimed distrust of the US Intelligence Community.

Yeah well, a broken clock can still be right twice a day.

Interesting to have Greenwald define treason. Is he trying to keep himself out of that illustrious crowd? Guess living in a foreign country makes one braver than usual.

It's not Greenwald's definition - he sourced it in the video from Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii

And then goes on to cite previous court cases and what charges were actually brought in them.

It's nice to see someone say that when a person would be hounded to no end online if they showed any skepticism of intelligence agencies' assertions that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections

whether I am addressing this to you or the audience: it has come out in the years since that in fact the US intelligence community agreed there was no credible threat of WMDs in Iraq, but they mostly kept their mouth shut when the Bush administration claimed otherwise.

That's also my impression. I followed that closely.

It's also my impression that the US intelligence community tried to warn the Bush administration about the 9/11 attackers, but that Condoleezza Rice blew them off.[0]

0) https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-director...

> It's also my impression that the US intelligence community tried to warn the Bush administration about the 9/11 attackers, but that Condoleezza Rice blew them off.

Nah, the official report from the CIA was FOIAed. IMO this meme that the CIA saw it all right is just Washington internal politics leaking out.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/259216899/Iraq-October-2002-NIE-o...

Page 13

> High Confidence

> * Iraq is continuing, and in some cases expanding, its biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.

The report also spends a long time parroting that yellowcake BS too.

But it wasn't just the CIA. I've read that the NSA had intercepts.[0] And regarding the NSA, I tend to trust Bamford. I also gather that NSA staff didn't want to reveal too many specifics, to avoid compromising methods etc, and that their reticence proved counterproductive.

The FBI were reportedly also close to the hijackers.[1] And they also have lots of data on Saudi connections.[2]

Also, there used to be an article on salon.com about a team of Mossad agents that was tracking the 9/11 hijackers. But now I don't find it. As I recall, there were connections to young Mossad agents in the US, who posed as artists, selling their work door-to-door.[3] I've also read that it was rather a rite of passage for young agents. With the US being relatively safe for training.

0) https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/21/missed-calls-nsa-terror...

1) https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=129563&page=1

2) https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-fbi-is-keeping-80000-secre...

3) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel...

Costs of those wars are going to be, at the final tally, around $6 billion. Most of it will be through deserved veterans benefits, as was/is the case with Vietnam. Trump has recently been claiming $7 billion, although I haven’t seen evidence for that.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-iraq-war-cost-2-tril...

Not that I like Business Insider as a source, but I think you're off from the article by about $5.94 trillion.

Really, it was all the New York Times & the US government had nothing to do with it? Go away, propaganda troll.

There's no "propaganda trolling" here. The newspapers & media conglomerates pay a big role in lying to the American public to manufacture consent, with the help of the US government and intelligence agencies. They work together.

Check out Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

On occasion maybe individuals. And certainly more on the right than the left. But they don't work together in the least.

Personal attacks and name-calling will get you banned here regardless of how wrong someone else is. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on.

Edit: actually, since you've done this repeatedly after we warned you, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

Whataboutism.

Your statement, while accurate, says nothing about the veracity of the current article.

I wish I could do more than downvote you.

> I wish I could do more than downvote you.

It’s off topic garbage, and generated an equally garbage subthread, so flagging is certainly appropriate.

Indeed. It's called "Operation Mockingbird". I'm sure it's a different name by now, but all these people talking about this subject, I usually do a ctrl+f "mockingbird" and when I see nothing I know they aren't getting to the heart of the issue.

Another thing no one talks about? The massive consolidation via mergers and acquisitions in the media/journalism world. It's been show multiple times that ownership is used to influence those things, but when those ownerships become monopolies owned by fewer and fewer oligarchical uber-rich, there are less and less voices in the wilderness speaking truth.

What I do is find a truth teller and read all his or her stuff. Robert Fisk, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, Steve Coll, Matt Taibbi, Michael Hastings (assassinated), Gary Webb (assassinated), Jeremy Scahill, Richard Grove, and John Perkins are just a few on my list.

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