Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls Poll: Which US presidential candidate do you like best?

All right, Roger. I stand corrected.

I agree with you that the media can't always be relied on. Not infrequently, they simply get their facts wrong. Sometimes they just don't bother to check their sources, sometimes they are just sloppy so that they accidentally misquote their sources, and sometimes, they get their facts wrong because they only search for the facts that would support their own point of view. It is even possible that they occasionally misquote their sources deliberately because they cheat deliberately.

But are you telling me that whatever the media writes is wrong? Are you telling me, in particular, that whatever the liberal media writes is wrong? Are you really saying that? That is an extremely serious charge, Roger. What would you say if I claimed that conservative media lie about whatever they report?

This is a very, very serious charge, Roger. You say that I admit that the New York times can't be relied on. And yet you see that I quote the NYT relatively frequently. Are you saying that I know or strongly suspect that the facts that I quote from the NYT are wrong?

For your information, Roger. I don't quote anything that doesn't strike me as reliable.

As for those 500 WMDs that the Iraq Survey Group found in Iraq. I have already pointed out that Iraq most certainly did have WMDs in the eighties, since Saddam used such weapons to commit genocide on Iraqi Kurds. But a few years after that Bush Sr. attacked Iraq over its invasion of Kuwait. I believe that Bush Sr. also imposed sanctions on Iraq and sent inspectors to Iraq to make sure that old WMDs were destroyed and that no new ones were built. I certainly know that Bill Clinton upheld those sanctions and sent more inspectors there. Because of that, the question is not so much if parts of WMDs were found in Iraq, but whether or not they were functional, or could easily be made fully functional. Could Saddam use those 500 WMDs to attack someone?

Tell me this, Roger. I subscribe to a daily newspaper which I would describe as rather right-wing. You might very well describe it as bleeding-heart leftist. Well, take it from me: I read that paper every day, and believe me, my newspaper defended the Iraq war as long as it possibly could. First it told us that Iraq really was a terrible threat to the world because of its WMDs. Then it rather stopped talking about the WMDs, as if it didn't believe in them anymore, and instead it talked about how important it was to bring democracy and liberty to Iraq and the Middle East. Nowadays my newspaper sounds a bit embarrassed when it talks about the Iraq war. Its message these days is that the war was justified, because it was right to try to bring democracy and liberty to the Middle East, but unfortunately Bush botched the war because he conducted it so badly.

To summarize, however, my newspaper has been a rather staunch defender of the Iraq war. And yet it has never claimed that any WMDs were found in Iraq. Why hasn't it, Roger? It must be in the interest of my newspaper to prove itself right. If functional WMDs had indeed been found in Iraq, the war would have been pretty much justified right there and then. If functional WMDs had been found in Iraq, why would my newspaper keep that information from me? As a newspaper, it has pledged itself to bring me important news about the world. And as a newspaper which supported the Iraq war, it should be very interested in proving to its readers that it made the right assessment about Iraq from the start.

This is why I don't believe that those 500 WMDs in Iraq were functional when they were found, Roger. Because if they had been, my newspaper would have jumped at the chance to tell me so.

This is one method I use to try to assess the trustworthiness of news. In whose interest is it that this news becomes well known? If I come across something that seems well-researched, and which gives me sources and statistics to prove its point, but which presents facts that are completely new to me, I start by asking myself if it is reasonable that this could be true and yet widely unknown. If the facts that are presented are embarrassing to powerful interests, to governments, to important players on the world market, to wealthy institutions and established ideologies, then I might suspect that those mighty players may have helped suppress these facts, because it is not in their interest that the facts become known. Of course, I have no right to suppose that anything that would be embarrassing to those who are in power must be true just because of that. But if the facts are true and if they are embarrassing to those who are in power, then it makes sense that those powerful people would at least not use their own TV channels and radio stations and newspapers and magazines to spread and broadcast these embarrassing facts. And that goes a long way to explain why these facts are mostly unknown.

Let me give you an example. A few years ago a left-wing newspaper in Sweden claimed that poverty has increased in India in recent years, even though Indian authorities claim that poverty is down. The Swedish article said that this is because Indian authorites have changed its definition of poverty. Previously, a poor person was defined as someone who couldn't buy enough food to get himself or herself a certain amount of calories every day. Poverty was defined as the inability to give oneself a sufficient daily amount of calories to stay healthy. However, in recent years, Indian authorities changed its definition of poverty so that it now means making less than a fixed amount of money, of rupees, every day. But, according to the article, the new definition of poverty does not take purchasing power into account at all. Indeed, according to the article, food has generally become more expensive in India, and hundreds of millions of people who are defined as "not poor" because of the number of rupees they make, can't afford to buy a reasonable amount of food for their money. By the old definition, they were poor. By the new definition, they are not. So we have a situation where, according to the article, the Indian authorities define more people as "not poor", while in reality a growing number of people aren't able to feed themselves.

Poverty in India, as it was defined before. What the definition of poverty in India means today. (Yes, I agree that the pictures are exaggerated.)

In whose interest would it be that these facts become known? Clearly, it would be in the interest of the poor people of India. Well, what platforms do the poor people of India own from which they can make their needs and concerns widely known? Do they onw TV channels? Radio stations? Big newspapers and magazines? I severely doubt it. Those who do own big important media, do they want to make it known that poverty is growing worse in India (assuming that it is, of course)?

No. They don't. There is a large and growing and increasingly affluent middle class in India. They must be happy about the economic situation and development in India. Why would they want to call attention to increasing poverty among the lower classes in India? So if it is indeed true that poverty is increasing in India, then there is a good reason for why this fact is not widely known at all. It is not in the interest of those who control the media to call attention to it.

But just as it is not in the interest of those who control the media in India to call attention to the growing poverty there, so it is indeed in the interest of all those who supported the Iraq war to insist that functioning WMDs were found in Iraq, if indeed they were. Therefore, if my own pro-war newspaper won't tell me that there were functioning WMDs found in Iraq, I am most definitely going to assume that there weren't any.

Roger, you said this:

Well, I frankly don't believe that France and Russia would have killed the sanctions against Iraq, most certainly not after Bush and Blair started claiming that Iraq could launch nuclear missiles at European capitals within fifteen minutes.

I didn't hear it because my pro-war newspaper didn't tell me about it. And if my newspaper didn't repeat what Rush Limbaugh said, I guess that must be because they didn't find his claims at all convincing. I certainly don't mean to imply that my local newspaper would have disbelieved the Iraq Survey Group, only that my newspaper didn't find the ISG's finds significant.

Lebanon is a special case, because there are large groups of Christians there who aren't even oppressed. To the Christian Lebanese, the Iraq war was an inspiration. All in all though, things have certainly been much worse in Lebanon than they are now, but they have also been better. And Palestine? People in Gaza voted for Hamas. Is that a shining example of the blessings of the Iraq war?

Wow. Imagine that democratic movements in other countries have so little faith in themselves that they will just lie down and die the moment they can read in the New York Times that the United States is losing in Iraq.

Is it possible that other things about the United States may have influenced democratic movements in other countries negatively and made the United States look less like an inspiration? Could Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo have something to do with it, or the killing of civilians in Iraq? What about Bush's veto against prohibiting torture against prisoners of war? Oh, sorry, I remember - they aren't prisoners of war, are they, they are just illegal combatants?

(Right now they said on my radio that another American soldier who had been charged with the killing of Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005 had been acquitted by an American court. The message to the world seems to be that if Americans kill people of other nationalities, they will not be punished for it.)

The way that you use the expression "the killing fields" makes me think of a raging American military sweeping the countryside of another country, killing every living thing they come across.



You say that America needs to do this because America needs to defeat Al Qaeda. But the problem is that Al Qaeda isn't cut off from the rest of the world. It isn't separate from the rest of the world. Yes, Al Qaeda is really pretty much separate from the rest of Iraq, because this terror organisation has no roots there: they were never in Iraq before the United States lured them there by attacking that country. But Al Qaeda has roots in other countries. It has roots in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Algeria and Morocco, among other countries. What makes you think that the families and brothers of those Al Qaeda terrorists that you kill in Iraq will not take up the fight themselves and take it elsewhere?

The situation in Iraq is not good at all. What we have seen is not so much the growth of a democratic society as a society fracturing under the the stress of ethnic cleansing. Sunnis, Shias and Kurds are increasingly unable to live together. Also, while Iraq used to be a relatively secular society, it is now a society where Islam and Islamism plays an ever more important role.

The situation has become particularly precarious for women. Recently a Swedish reporter returned from Iraq and reported on Swedish television that more and more Iraqi parents keep their daughters home from school, more and more Iraqi women are bullied into leaving their jobs, and more and more women are murdered for breaking Sharia rules. Recently New York Times reported that two female principals of important Iraqi schools had been murdered. Yes, I read it in the New York Times. Is it untrue because I read it in the New York Times? No, Roger. It is still true, even though it was the New York Times that reported it.

It's not as if all the world is peaceful except Iraq. There is a lot of bad stuff going on in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example.

You are telling me that as long as America does not give up in Iraq, its war on terror is going to be very successful. What can I reply to that, Roger? Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But I remind you that many years ago when I debated with a Communist, he insisted that Communism would succeed wonderfully in the future. All I can say about that is that when somebody's chief argument is that the future will prove him gloriously right, he makes it impossible for his opponent to have a rational discussion with him.

Ann