Krugman vs Okrent

Editor & Publisher notes the latest development in a spat between New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and outgoing Times "public editor" (aka ombudsman) Daniel Okrent. The piece notes Krugman's defense - in a letter to the editor - against Okrent's contention that Krugman has "a disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults." Krugman contends that Okrent "offered no examples of my 'disturbing habit.'"

Krugman's not about to let this go lightly - nor should he. And apparently Krugman and Okrent "will be addressing this matter further on the Public Editor's Web Journal [now run by Byron Calame] early in the week."

Europe "de haut en bas"? Not anymore

I've been travelling about quite a bit over the past week (to Binghamton, NY for a technology conference; to New York, NY for the ICA conference, though really to meet some old friends; and to Levittown, PA, for family stuff). But I've tried to keep up with latest developments in Europe, where in a weekend referendum France rejected the European Constitution by 55% to 45%. (See here for latest developments on the BBC; here for The Guardian; and here for The Independent.

While I've found all the coverage fascinating, perhaps the best roundup I've read so far of the whole sorry affair and what it means for Europe is provided by good old John Simpson, the BBC's veteran world affairs editor. Simpson has pronounced the idea of a United States of Europe "dead in the water" - something I've heard from multiple sources, though I'm more likely to believe it from Simpson. As he states:

The entire project, noble though it was, was much too "de haut en bas" [from top to bottom], as the French say - handed down to the hoi polloi by idealists who knew the direction Europe should take, and weren't prepared to take no for an answer.

Simpson provides the sort of personal historical context that only an old-timer can serve up - after all he was there to report on the results of Britain's 1975 referendum, which secured the UK's place in the then-EEC. He correctly contrasts France's and Britain's competing visions for Europe, and suggests that Britain's vision may well now dominate. Well worth a read.

Public media on the defensive

Second item of the day in re. the "on the defensive" theme: Tom Ashbrook of NPR's On Point makes a profoundly reasonable plea for sanity to the CPB's Ken Tomlinson. First, Ashbrook, writing in the Boston Globe, states the well-known facts of the case:

Now the Corporation for Public Broadcasting board is dominated by appointees of a Republican, George W. Bush. But NPR's listeners self-identify themselves across the American political spectrum -- one-third conservative, one-third liberal, and one-third independent. Repeated surveys ordered up by Tomlinson himself have found that large majorities of listeners do not hear liberal bias at NPR. For its latest survey the corporation commissioned two polling firms, one Republican and one Democrat. They found that fewer than 15 percent of Americans say that NPR coverage of the war or the Bush administration is slanted. And 80 percent of Americans say they have an overall favorable impression of NPR. Those are pretty darned good numbers. And, yet, the swords are drawn in Washington.

Ashbrook wants to know, "How do we move beyond this?" I'm not sure. Tomlinson is part of a general pattern of right-wing intimidation that is manifesting itself across the U.S. news spectrum. And he notes the resonance of Soviet-style information control in the reported desire by the CPB to replace hard news with more music. I truly fear his pleas to Tomlinson will fall on deaf ears. After all, Ashbrook reminds us that Tomlinson "has singled out Bill Moyers at PBS for criticism, even as Moyers has departed and PBS has -- at the direction of the corporation -- brought on the conservative Tucker Carlson and editors of The Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial page." What's more, "Last month, despite objections from NPR, which already had an active ombudsman, the corporation appointed its own ombudsmen -- one right leaning and one left -- to monitor public broadcasting content for political slant. This is almost certain to raise partisan tensions and tempt more intervention."

I'm sure Tomlinson will ignore Ashbrook's plea for sense, But I hope NPR stations will not ignore Ashbrook's admonition to them:

Don't retreat. Do reach out. Don't shrink back. Be more bold. Don't rest on those poll numbers. Know that this whole country, with all the people in it, is your ideal audience. The whole population -- red states, blue states, everybody. So speak to all. Listen to all. Test every assertion and premise. And be journalistically critical of all. Not in a desperate balancing act between parties and competing agendas. The goal is not to balance two spins. But listen and dig for honesty, for the understanding and insight the whole country needs. Does that sound difficult in this divided time? Yes, but that's the job.

Private news media on the defensive

Two good commentary pieces in the mainstream press today - outlining the pressures the government is placing on both private and public news media, both of which are on the defensive.

First item of the day is by E. J. Dionne. Writing in the Washington Post, Dionne points to Newsweek's recent travails over the Guantanamo/Koran incident, which I talked about on Tuesday. He worries that "too many people in traditional journalism are becoming dangerously defensive in the face of a brilliantly conceived conservative attack on the independent media." An interesting point he makes is that conservatives have taken on the mantle of "postmodernism":

Conservative academics have long attacked "postmodernist" philosophies for questioning whether "truth" exists at all and claiming that what we take as "truths" are merely "narratives" woven around some ideological predisposition. Today's conservative activists have become the new postmodernists. They shift attention away from the truth or falsity of specific facts and allegations -- and move the discussion to the motives of the journalists and media organizations putting them forward. Just a modest number of failures can be used to discredit an entire enterprise.
Of course journalists make mistakes, sometimes stupid ones. Dan Rather should not have used those wacky documents in reporting on President Bush's Air National Guard service. Newsweek has been admirably self-critical about what it sees as its own mistakes on the Guantanamo story. Anonymous sources are overused. Why quote a nameless conservative saying a particular columnist is "an idiot liberal" when many loyal right-wingers could be found to say the same thing even more colorfully on the record? If the current controversies lead to better journalism, three cheers.

But this particular anti-press campaign is not about Journalism 101. It is about Power 101. It is a sophisticated effort to demolish the idea of a press independent of political parties by way of discouraging scrutiny of conservative politicians in power. By using bad documents, Dan Rather helped Bush, not John Kerry, because Rather gave Bush's skilled lieutenants the chance to use the CBS mistake to close off an entire line of inquiry about the president. In the case of Guantanamo, the administration, for a while, cast its actions as less important than Newsweek's.

Blame the media - it always works

I've been saddened to see again how pussy-whipped the U.S. news media have been by the current Bush administration - the latest evidence being the cowering response to the vicious and undeserved administration attack on Newsweek over the retraction of its anonymously sourced story about the Koran being flushed down a toilet in Guantanamo Bay by U.S. interrogators.
Frank Rich, in a Sunday New York Times piece (reprinted in Truthout.org), notes the insane lengths to which Scott McClellan went to pin the blame on the media, thus:

"Our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care," said the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, as he eagerly made the magazine the scapegoat for lethal anti-American riots in Afghanistan. Indeed, Mr. McClellan was so fixated on destroying Newsweek - and on mouthing his own phony P.C. pieties about the Koran - that by omission he whitewashed the rioters themselves, Islamic extremists who routinely misuse that holy book as a pretext for murder.

That's how absurdly over-the-top the assault on Newsweek has been. The administration has been so successful at bullying the news media in order to cover up its own fictions and failings in Iraq that it now believes it can get away with pinning some 17 deaths on an errant single sentence in a 10-sentence Periscope item that few noticed until days after its publication. Coming just as the latest CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll finds that only 41 percent of Americans think the war in Iraq is "worth fighting" and only 42 percent think it's going well, this smells like desperation. In its war on the press, this hubristic administration may finally have crossed a bridge too far.

What, the administration going too far in unfairly slamming the media and being held to account for it!? Oh, I don't think so! Not if Patrick Healy, writing in the same "Week in Review" in Sunday's Times is to be believed. He recounts a battery of statistics (many of which I've mentioned before) showing just how low public trust has gone in the U.S. media. Here are the most stomach-churning examples, fyi:

In the post-Watergate 1970's, some 25 to 30 percent of Americans reported to the Harris Poll that they had a great deal of confidence in the press, more than they had in Congress, unions or corporate America. In the 2005 poll, the press ranked only ahead of law firms, with 12 percent reporting high confidence in the media.

Another poll, in 2003 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, found that 66 percent of Americans see news reports as slanted, compared with 53 percent in 1985. Even more stunning to some analysts, 32 percent judged news organizations to be immoral, up from 13 percent in 1985.

"Today we have a case where the public is suspicious of the values of the news media as well," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "I don't know if it's a crisis, but it's a hell of a growing problem."

For the first time, Pew also asked Americans in 2003 if they believed some news organizations, which were not identified, were becoming too critical of America. Nearly half the respondents, 46 percent, said yes; 48 percent said no.

"More people think media companies are motivated by profit, and put stories on the front page to serve that interest, and that reporters are motivated by their own career advancement more than any concern about the country," Mr. Rosenstiel said.

Perhaps an even more dire forecast came in another Pew report, Trends 2005, which found 45 percent of Americans saying they believed little or nothing of what they read in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago.

So, no problems for the Bush administration spin doctors there, then. Even as their poll numbers plummet, they can clearly continue to blast the pernicious media - whose own popularity numbers will always be lower - and get away with it. No charge is too outrageous to throw at the media, as Scott McClellan proved last week.

The Nation weighs in on American radio

Last week's issue of the venerable The Nation focused on the dire state of radio in this country, with lots of very interesting pieces such as these (I've linked to free links where possible, but some articles are only available to subscribers on The Nation's web site):

• Confessions of a Listener, by Garrison Keillor (a personal view of radio's place in America today by NPR's prime old-timer)
  
• Calling Air America, by Nicholas von Hoffman (examining the shaky state of liberal network Air America)
  
• Prometheus Unbound, by Rick Karr (on the steady rise of Low-Power FM, starting in West Philadelphia - see also On the Media's recent piece on this issue)
  
• Amy Goodman's "Empire", by Lizzy Ratner (examining the rise to prominence of the respected yet still-edgy "Democracy Now" host)
  
• Congress tunes in, by Robert McChesney, John Nichols, and Ben Scott (which provides a helpful overview of just about everything, starting with the thrilling 2003 public uprising against FCC plans to raise national broadcast media ownership limits to 45% - lest we forget)
  
• Anyone Listening?, by Eric Magnuson (recounting how a certain freight train crash in Minot, North Dakota in 2002, and the inability of Clear Channel-owned radio stations to respond, helped spark a national anti-media conglomeration backlash)
  
• Good, Gray NPR, by Scott Sherman (on the drift of National Public radio to the sober, sometimes dull, mainstream respectability, and what the service has gained and lost since the freewheeling 1970s)
  

All in all, this is an excellent mix of writing, well worth taking the time to read properly.

Bill Moyers hits back

Bill Moyers, the target of unremitting partisan criticism by CPB chair Kenneth Tomlinson, has hit back in a speech to the National Conference for Media Reform in St Louis. Although focused on Tomlinson's grossly partisan right-wing agenda (I've talked about this in previous blogs here and here) Moyers' speech also struck at the core of the problem facing American democracy and its media freedoms today.

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.

This would be why the speech was titled "A democracy can die of too many lies".

A full transcript of Moyers' speech is available on Salon here

The Hitchhikers' Guide to Commencement

Sometimes I get so perplexed at the rubbish job being done by the mainstream U.S. news media on any number of serious issues that I think about following the advice of Slartibarfast, the Magrathean planetary designer in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied."

At dark times I think that the choice is either that or else try and find out everything, realize I can't and in any case I can't do a thing about it, and stay depressed all the time - just like Marvin the Paranoid Android. Marvin's favorite quote is "What's the use?"

Oh dear.

(Incidentally, the movie version of Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, a US-UK co-production, has been doing rather well in the States - in its second week of release it was number 3 at the U.S. box office, having held the number 1 spot in its first week of release. I suppose the Brits can still sell sci-fi and comedy as a package in the U.S.)

I bring this up here and now because last weekend, at Geneseo's 139th Commencement, our Commencement speaker - retiring Physics professor David Meisel - actually incorporated H2G2 (what the fans call the Hitchhikers' Guide) into his talk to the grads - and in a very interesting way.

In his address, titled "The Answer is 42" he noted that one of the themes of H2G2 is that of most people's predilection for simple answers and the endless search for them (e.g., to "life, the universe and everything"), when in fact they would better serve themselves by trying to figure out the appropriate questions. Meisel pointed - in a barely disguised fashion - to President Bush's escapades in Iraq as an example of what happens when we base our actions on the search for simple answers (Good versus Evil, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Us and Them, You're With Us or Against Us, all that stuff) instead of taking the time and effort to consider the very complex questions involved.

Now I liked Meisel's speech and I liked the H2G2 analogy and its application to current events. He didn't mention the media directly, but I'm sure if he thought about it he'd recognize that the mass media, and especially television news, are all about easy, bite-sized, one-dimensional answers rather than complex, considered questions. That's why Bush got away with what he did in the court of public opinion. Now I know that, even as a college professor, the chances of my finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that perhaps I should just try to keep myself occupied. But the difference between my job and that of most other poor working schleps of the world is that it's my job to keep myself occupied by thinking about the hard questions! (Well, that and grading exams and papers.) And maybe, if I and others like me could just persuade enough people around us to do that one thing - to consider the hard questions rather than always be seduced by easy answers - then things like the Iraq invasion wouldn't happen quite as often, and we'd all be better off. Now can that ever happen in a TV and visual-saturated world?
Hmmmmmmmmm . . .

Hang the sense of it.

CPB's dangerous right-wing swing

The radical right in this country doesn't like public radio - not because it's politically biased, but because it's a rare center of media power in this country that is not completely under the thumb of either right-wing demagogery or heavy commercial pressure. Now NPR is coming under pressure from a development that's been gathering steam for some time (and commented on previously in this blog): the attempt by the CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) and its Republican chair, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, to bludgeon public radio into ineffectiveness. The New York Times reports the latest battles in this dangerous new war:

In one of several points of conflict in recent months, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates federal funds for public radio and television, is considering a plan to monitor Middle East coverage on NPR news programs for evidence of bias, a corporation spokesman said on Friday.

The corporation's board has told its staff that it should consider redirecting money away from national newscasts and toward music programs produced by NPR stations.

And last week (as I noted in London Calling), Eric Boehlert in Salon had an extended piece on Tomlinson's effort to push PBS firmly to the right.

The thing is, everyone who's not an extreme right-winger knows that NPR and PBS does not display a systematic liberal bias (and polls show this is the case with the general public too). NPR is far from perfect, but it is trying to act as an independent and credible source of analysis of the government; and since the Republicans now almost control everything in government, it's inevitable that NPR's reports will likely tackle more Republican crimes and misdemeanors. That's not bias - it's responsible Fourth Estate journalism!

As for PBS, I've nothing but contempt for the notion that public television displays a left-wing bias. If anything, I think, many liberals see PBS's flagship "News Hour with Jim Lehrer" as leaning to the right. As for "NOW with Bill Moyers" (which has now lost Bill Moyers) - again, it's not bias that makes that show so compelling - it's serious journalism. I'm convinced that if the Democrats ran all of Washington today, Moyers would be getting stuck into them with just as much fervour.

Anyway, if PBS does become just another quiet and uncritical tool of those in power, then it will be one more place in the American media spectrum that is effectively off-limits to serious discussion of news and public affairs, and another blow to American democracy. As more and more Americans despair of receiving full, fair, accurate and critical news - of their own country as well as other countries - from U.S. media, so they will desperately look abroad for the news they need. The likely beneficiaries from this development will be overseas media - and especially those in Britain.

The Incredible Shrinking Box Office

Last night my partner and I went to the movies (specifically Pittsford Plaza) to see Kingdom of Heaven (she's a big Orlando Bloom fan), and I was once again struck by how noisy some of the theater patrons were. As is often the case, too many theater patrons just can't shut up during a movie! This is especially true of younger people. Sometimes I shush people - and repeatedly - but as often as not that just doesn't work. So last night we took early evasive action by moving to the back of the theater just before the film started, so as to get some peace to watch the movie. Fortunately the noisy brats were all toward the front, and it was a fairly big theater. Calm was restored, though at a price.

But things are undoubtedly getting worse with noisy, rude, and ignorant movie audiences. And Pittsford Plaza is in fact one of the less distracting places in this regard. (FYI: If you value audience silence during a movie, and live in the Rochester, NY area, for god's sake do not go anywhere near Regal Cinemas Culver Ridge, in Irondequoit. You will go mad.) But it's not just the kids: last month I even had to shush a older couple during a screening of Downfall (about the last days of Hitler). Now they were German, but that's still no excuse. National guilt about your embarrassing past is all very well, but that doesn't give you leave to blabber about it during a movie. I can watch Gandhi and squirm at the Amritsar massacre scene, but I don't need to announce to the audience, "That's terrible; on behalf of the British state of which I am uncomfortably a subject, I'd just like to say I feel really bad about that." It's not required. I think it's better to keep that to myself. So should you all. No matter how much you feel you have to say something during a screening - unless it's "My husband's having a heart attack, help!" - you really, really don't! Just shut up!

Anyway, I bring this up because this morning I happened to read in this week's Entertainment Weekly that cinema audiences have been consistently down throughout this year, and many in the industry are worried that the future of big cinematic releases (the whole summer blockbuster "tentpole"/3,000-cinema big release thing) could be in jeopardy. Now there are lots of reasons for why this is happening, and EW helpfully gives us the results of an online poll asking respondents "What keeps you away from seeing a movie in theaters?" Here are their results:

28% The quality of movies — most of them suck
22% The ticket price
11% People in theaters are rude and annoying
9% The DVD is out in a couple months anyway — I can wait
3% I hate sitting through all those pre-movie ads
26% All of the above

I think you can guess which of the above options I would respond to (though "All of the above" is also worth seriously considering.)

The fact is, that for people like me, the big suburban multiplexes have become almost uninhabitable - populated with hordes of noisy juveniles who can't differentiate between watching a DVD at home (when some discussion is allowed) and watching it in a theater (when it manifestly is not!) Yet these teens are the very people that the studios chase after with their blockbuster movies. Now I like to see the odd Big Dumb Movie myself - but increasingly, I'll have to avoid them by retreating to the boutique alternative theaters (the Little, the Dryden), or else reconsider the financial necessity of that 42" plasma screen HDTV for the DVDs!

Now, truth be known, I'm way too cheap for that 42" plasma screen HDTV. (Let's reconsider this when the good ones get under $1,000). Fortunately, however, when it comes to Big Dumb Movies, there is one other valid option out there (at least for the summer): Drive-in theaters. We're blessed in this area to have two great drive-ins, at the Vintage Drive-in, Avon and the Silver Lake Drive-in in Perry, NY.

What can I say: I love drive-in movies!

From Laura Bush to "The Daily Show"

Here's an excellent piece by Frank Rich detailing fairly comprehensively how low the U.S. news media have gone. The opinion piece, appearing in Sunday's New York Times, kicks off with Laura Bush's already infamous horse masturbation story about her husband at the sick annual junket aka the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. Using this news peg to rightly castigate the mostly useless news media and the White House Press Corps (partially excepting NBC's David Gregory) for their sins, he hits home by pointing to a rare bright spot for news in corporate media-land:

Much as we all delight in the latest horse-milking joke, the happiest news in comedy last week was the announcement that "The Daily Show" will be spinning off a new half-hour on Comedy Central starring its "senior White House correspondent," Stephen Colbert. Make no mistake about it: the ratings rise of Jon Stewart's fake news has been in direct relation to the show's prowess at blowing the whistle on propaganda when the legitimate press fails to do so. The correspondents' dinner, itself a "Daily Show" target last week, could not have been a more graphic illustration of why, at a time when trust in real news is plummeting, there's a bull market for fake news that can really be trusted to know what is fake. [My italics]

And btw, I didn't realize that the Drudge Report was exactly ten years old. Happy Birthday, Matt Drudge . . . or not.

Don't forget Iraq

I'm compelled to keep putting up links to professional, considered, serious journalism on the conduct of the Iraq War - to highlight the contrast with the neutered version most Americans see on their TV screens. Here are five recent examples of serious opinion on Iraq, all from Salon:

• Prophetic words Just about everyone - even Bush - predicted the perilous situation the U.S. military finds itself in. By Robert Schlesinger
  
• Melting pot of blood With the insurgency boiling over and sectarian strife spreading, ethnic divisions threaten to derail the new Iraqi government. By Juan Cole
  
• At the breaking point The Bush administration's unrealistic war planning has increased the dangers facing the men and women on the ground in Iraq. By Robert Schlesinger
  
• The war according to David HackworthThe retired colonel calls Donald Rumsfeld an "asshole" whose bad planning mired U.S. troops in an ugly guerrilla conflict in Iraq. His sources? Defiant soldiers sending dispatches from the front. By Jonathan Franklin
  
• Secret memo A secret memo publicized in Britain confirms the lies on which Bush based his Iraq policy. Why has it received so little notice in the U.S. press? By Joe Conason (previously referred to)
  

Cable news gets slammed by PEIJ

Here's an old post from March that I never put up. But it's still pretty important.

What's it all about? Well, it's true after all: Fox News is opinionated and one-sided! And the other cable news channels aren't much better. That's just one part of the findings of a huge report, called The State of the News Media 2005, by Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report, which was released earlier this year, can be found here. It's an important annual report card for the media. It has lots to say about lots of media, but one of the headlines is about Fox. As Howard Kurtz notes for the Washington Post

In a 617-page report, the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 73 percent of the stories on Fox News covering the Iraq war last year included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them. By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists' own views. The report found that "Fox is more deeply sourced than its rivals," while CNN is "the least transparent about its sources of the three cable channels, but more likely to present multiple points of view."

So much for the Iraq War. What about cable news performance more generally?

The [PEIJ] project describes cable news reporting as pretty thin compared with the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts. Only a quarter of the cable stories examined contained two or more identifiable sources, compared with 49 percent of network evening news stories and 81 percent of newspaper front-page stories. This, says the study, is in part because cable leans heavily on live reports, 60 percent of which are based on only a single identifiable source ("the White House said today," etc.). What's more, cable news is far more one-sided than other media outlets, with only a quarter of the stories involving controversy making more than a passing reference to a second point of view. By contrast, says the report, the network morning shows, PBS and newspaper front pages were more than three times as likely to contain a mix of views.

TV Nation

Yet more figures showing just how addicted Americans are to the telly. The Christian Science Monitor reports figures based on Nielsen ratings that "children in the US will spend more time in front of the television set per year (1,023 hours) than in their classrooms (900 hours)." And of course it's not just the kids. "In fact, Americans typically watch more than four hours of TV every day. From age 2 through 65, that translates to watching more than 10 entire years of TV." The news peg for this latest barrage of damning stats is that TV Turnoff Week was underway in late April. (Of course it's over now, and I'm sorry I didn't get around to pointing it out earlier. Maybe I should remind myself for next year to get the students to do a "Media Fast" as part of one of my classes.)

Now in fact kids are also spending much more time on the web and with video games - and up to a point that has reduced their consumption of traditional TV. But the overall media usage component is way up.

CSM also came up with another interesting TV-related quote, this time by Frank Lloyd Wright, who once observed that "Television is like chewing gum for the eyes"!

Blair, Juan Cole, and UK-US duplicity

As I noted in London Calling, Juan Cole, professor of History at the University of Michigan and blogger extraordinaire, has used the occasion of the British general election (which Blair won, though with a sharply reduced majority) to put together all the pieces of news and intelligence that implicate Blair in lying to the British people over the War in Iraq. He focuses on a secret British memo (which originally appeared in the Times Online site) reflecting a clear consensus not only that Bush tampered with Iraq intelligence, but that Blair was complicit in Bush's scheme. Of course, none of this is new - although the latest memo does seem to be the clearest "smoking gun" for implicating Blair - but Cole's piece does bring Blair's and Bush's duplicity into sharp relief.

In some ways, the British action was even more reprehensible than that of the Americans. Depending on your point of view, Bush and his team either had a faith-based conviction that they were in a just cause, or they just didn't care about international law and, a la John Bolton, thought it didn't apply to a sovereign America. But the British were steeped in the importance of international law and global liberal functionalism (I covered this in London Calling). They decided to ignore all that and go with the Americans, even though they knew,right down to their socks, that what they were doing was wrong! As Cole notes about the "justification" for war:

So the "justification" would have to be provided by "fixing" the intelligence around the policy. Bush was just going to make things up, since the realities did not actually justify his planned war! The British cabinet sat around and admitted to themselves that a) there was no justification for the war into which they were allowing themselves to be dragged and b) that the war would be gotten up through Goebbels-like techniques!

It is even worse. British Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith was at the meeting. He had to think up a justification for the war in international law. Britain is in Europe, and Europe takes international law seriously. You could have war crimes trials.

Yes, you could have had (and could still have) war crimes trials - for British servicemen and women. That's what Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, former Chief of the Defence Staff, was complaining about when he felt he had not received full legal cover from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) - a court that Britain is bound to by treaty obligation.

I bring this up again, I suppose, because Tony Blair, the man who lied to the British people (and Michael Howard was right about this) has won his historic third election in Britain. And I'm a bit depressed by that. Now part of me still likes Blair. I don't like the Tories. Nor do I like that dangerous prima donna George Galloway, who narrowly defeated Labour MP Oona King on a vicious anti-Iraq war platform. But Blair's Iraq War policy was reprehensible. He didn't deserve to win a third general election, and doesn't dserve to stay on as prime minister (roll on, Gordon Brown!). I wish Blair would just go away now. If he could have served one useful purpose it would have been as a window for the American public into the Bush administration's duplicity. I'm not sure now that that's going to happen. This last point (the lack of U.S. coverage linking Blair's Iraq travails back to Bush) came up briefly in today's Diane Rehm show - the result of a caller's question - but it was quickly disposed of.

Addendum (5.7.2005):

I just have to note a piece by Salon's Joe Conason on this issue, that I quote from in a London Calling post.

Election Day in Britain

If I can drag myself away from grading for just a while, I'd like to try and pay attention to today's general election in Britain. I've covered this in more depth in the London Calling blog. But I thought I'd just mention here two very different perspectives on the British election - both from Brits living in the U.S. - provided by Simon Schama, writing in The Guardian; and Slate's foreign editor, June Thomas. You can make up your own mind about whether the Brits really do it better than the Yanks. I know whom I line up with.

CPB's Republican chair talks about "balance"

Today's New York Times reports on Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, chair of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB). Just as commercial media are being pushed to the right by corporate owners such as the Sinclair group, so the CPB, under Tomlinson, is pushing a right-wing agenda on public media, under the guise of "balance." The Benton Foundation notes that Tomlinson has:

• 1) "contracted, without knowledge of the rest of the CPB board, an outside consultant to keep track of the guests' political leanings on one program, "Now With Bill Moyers,"
  
• 2) "hired the director of the White House Office of Global Communications as a senior staff member to draft guidelines governing the work of two ombudsmen whom the corporation recently appointed to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts, and
  
• 3) "encouraged corporation and public broadcasting officials to broadcast "The Journal Editorial Report," whose host, Paul Gigot, is editor of the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal".

Tomlinson has also made it clear to the CPB board that his choice for a new chief executive is Patricia Harrison, "a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee who is now an assistant secretary of state."