They make a fine example of what's wrong with Corporate McPravda.
The Washington Post and the Downing Street memoBy Joseph Kay and Barry Grey
22 June 2005
EXCERPT...
The enormous publicity given the memo in Britain stood in the sharpest contrast to the virtual silence it evoked in the American media—a silence for which there is no innocent explanation. The “mainstream” media made a calculated political decision to bury the memo and keep the American people in the dark.
The memo provides irrefutable evidence, from the highest levels of the British state, that the March 2003 invasion of Iraq was launched on the basis of lies concocted to justify a predetermined policy. Among the lies were the repeated assurances of Bush and other top US government officials in the months and weeks preceding the war that no decision had been made to go to war and the US was exhaustively pursuing all peaceful alternatives.
SNIP...
But the Washington Post, the capital’s leading “liberal” newspaper, not only relegated Conyers’s hearing to its inside pages, it published a sneering and derogatory account that did not seek to conceal the newspaper’s fury over the congressman’s attempt to break through the wall of silence on the memo.
The World Socialist Web Site is no political supporter of Conyers, a Democratic politician who has worked for decades to maintain the subordination of American workers to the two-party system. Nevertheless, his treatment at the hands of the Post is quite extraordinary. The newspaper casts Conyers, one of the most senior members of Congress, as a buffoon, in order to denigrate the anti-war and anti-Bush sentiments expressed by the participants at his hearing.
To underline its attitude to both the hearing and the Downing Street memo itself, the Post published its account in its June 17 “Washington Sketch” column—a feature usually devoted to lighthearted commentary on the peccadilloes and curiosities of political life in the nation’s capital. Written by veteran Post journalist Dana Milbank, the column was headlined “Democrats Play House to Rally Against the War.”
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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/post-j22.shtml