The First Casualty of War

Aeschylus said that the first casualty of war is truth. That timeless sentiment has been proven over and over again throughout the bloodsoaked history of mankind.

But this current war might be the first in which truth was a victim of friendly-fire, if you think of official government propaganda as the enemy, and the crusading press as the defenders of the truth. I’ve long been disturbed by the rampant bias, looseness of journalistic standards, and “fake but true” reporting by our great media institutions, but Victor Davis Hanson captures the problem better than I ever could:

After reviewing the latest critique of the CIA’s failures to foresee the pre-9/11 dangers of radical Islam, and while reading the final sordid details surrounding the Pvt. Beauchamp fables published at The New Republic, and viewing the latest phony wire-photos from Iraq (the poor victimized Iraqi woman holding unfired cartridges as ‘proof’ of coalition bullets that hit her home), I was wondering who will monitor our self-righteous monitors?

The answer, like it or not, in the post-Plame, post-Scheuer, post-Tenet era is that no one believes much what the CIA says any more about the Middle East; no one believes that a wire-photo from there is genuine or its caption accurate; and no one necessarily believes anything in once respected magazines, whether the Periscope section of Newsweek or anything published in The New Republic. The common gripe is that the administration lied to the public about WMD in Iraq; but what is lost is that once revered institutions proved disingenuous in their accusations and unreliable in their performance.

It may be that the Bush Administration obfuscated details, or played politics, or straight up lied to the American public. I don’t think so, but even if that were true, I expect governments to dissemble in times of war.

I have to be able to trust the press, those who supposedly hold those in power accountable. But how anyone can continue to trust the press completely after the past six years is simply beyond me. And these wounds were self-inflicted. Beauchamp was not a Karl Rove plant to discredit TNR, anymore than the fake Bush TANG memos were some complex machination to ferret out Democratic operatives working inside CBS. No one made the reporters of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer cheer at the news of Rove’s resignation like schoolchildren cheering at word of their school team’s victory at Homecoming.

Freedom of the Press is guaranteed by the First Amendment. But who guarantees responsible exercise of that freedom?

Here’s hoping the guardians of truth wake up to their solemn responsibility to unbiased (as best as humanly possible) practice of their craft.

-TS