I was watching the today show this morning on NBC and Meredith Vieira did a very short statement about how a Pakistani judge had denied Raymond Allen Davis diplomatic immunity. The Allen Davis incident, which sparked a diplomatic disaster with Pakistan, has been largely ignored by our media. And when the media did mention it, as the Today show did this morning, they usually did so without providing accurate information about it or outright lying.
Meredith Vieira said Davis shot two Pakistani men as they were approaching his car. This is a flat out lie. Pakistani authorities, the US government, and not even Davis himself ever made such a claim. The today show simply made this up on their own accord with absolutely nothing to back it up.
These two men were not approaching Davis, they were stopped at a red light on their motorcycles in front of Davis's car. They were in no way in an attacking position. In addition, one of the men that was killed by Davis was shot in the back as he was trying to run away.
This simple lie alone might not be enough to warrant mentioning, but it is yet another example of a pattern of our media being more than happy to lie on behalf of our government. When this story first broke US press outlets knew that Davis was working for the CIA and was not a diplomat. But because the US government asked them to sit on the story they happily complied, even as the government was making public statements that these press outlets knew were false. The list of organizations that knew the status of Davis but decided to sit on it included The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Associated Press.
This is not the first time that the New York Times sat on a story on behalf of the US government. In 2004 before the elections The New York times had uncovered that the Bush administration was illegally spying on Americans. They later admitted (after initially lying about it) that they sat on the story until after the 2004 presidential elections.
Before that the media hyped up lies from the Bush administration about Iraq's weapon program. Although all major media was complicit lets again look at the New York Times. It was the New York Times that allowed Judith Miller, a tool of the defense department, to report absolute nonsense as fact. As Alex Pareene wrote for Salon.com a couple months back:
Since her early days at the Times, when she inserted CIA misinformation into a piece on Libya, she's always been a tool of power. She was the voice of the Defense Department, embedded at the Times. She was hyping bullshit stories about Iraq's WMD capabilities as far back as 1998, and in the run-up to the war, her front-page scoops were cited by the Bush administration as evidence that Saddam needed to be taken out, right away.
Lying exile grifter Ahmad Chalabi fed her the worst of the nonsense designed to push America into toppling Saddam Hussein (and giving Iraq to him), and she pushed that nonsense into the newspaper of record. She got everything wrong, and for some insane reason, she remained employed at the Times until 2005, when she negotiated her separation from her longtime professional home.
The lies Miller "reported" in the Times made it in to the headlines of just about every major media outlet there was including CNN, ABC, MSNBC, CBS, and countless others. The Bush administration used these reports from the Times as empirical evidence that Iraq had WMDs and was a serious threat to us (eventhough it was the Bush administration that fed Miller these stories).
When it was finally clear that we went to war based on lies the media acted as if they had no idea how that could have happened. When they were complicit in it. The same mentality on the part of the media that got us in to that war never changed and continues today as we watch the Raymond Allen Davis case unfold.
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To see this story with links please visit my original post on this http://www.leftunderground.com/content/175-raymond-allen-davis-and-Media-eager-to-lie-on-behalf-government">here
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