This Just In…….Joseph Goebbels Is STILL Dead!
This will come as quite a buzz kill for those who seem to believe that Joey and his Nazi cronies are alive and well within Bush’s Administration. The media microscope is steadily coming closer into focus on the details of the Private Lynch story. The Washington Post has gathered the most information yet, from a larger pool of sources, of the events, from the ambush of the US convoy to Jessica’s rescue and recovery. Of course, there are still some conflicting stories to shake out, and some missing pieces. Interestingly, apart from some purposeful willingness on the part of the Pentagon and White House to not jump in very quickly to correct some positive details that the initial media scrum was cranking out, it seems a great deal of the “Hollywood” storyline to this incident was due to the media feeding on each other’s flawed information. Not really the carefully scripted propaganda story that is being credited in some circles to Joseph, er, I mean, Ari, Donald and the rest.
Granted, the microscope of truth will continue to bring the facts even more into focus. But what appears to be becoming clearer is the ever-increasing likelyhood that this Hollywood tear-jerker was not made in D.C.
June 18th, 2003 at 5:46 am
Interestingly, the linked article doesn’t mention anything about the attempt by hospital workers to return Lynch to US forces, shortly before the rescue. That event was a prominent part of the BBC report that originally called the Hollywood version of the story into question. But the added details about the events leading to her capture are fascinating.
For myself, I never believed that the rescue was staged as a propaganda piece. As with the WMD intelligence, it isn’t that someone manufactured the story out of whole cloth. It’s that there was a conscious effort at the highest levels to “sex it up”, emphasizing certain parts of the story, de-emphasizing others, and slipping in a few key details to help a gullible public (and the cynical media that feeds that public’s desire for simple, dramatic stories) twist the thing into a false-to-fact version of reality that served the sexer-uppers’ purposes better than the “real” reality.
I’m sure Goebbels did the same thing any number of times. A good lie should always have a kernel of truth.
It’s interesting to me how you (Craig) and I interpret the meta-story of the Private Jessica reporting so differently, even when we both agree pretty much on the actual events that took place. For me, it’s a classic example of how the public was effectively misled. For you, it’s evidence that the public and the media did it to themselves, and that the Bush administration was blameless.
Which is really the same thing as the Jessica story happening all over again. The main action takes place outside the actual known details, in the interpretation and pattern-matching our brains do to flesh out the murky parts. That’s where we’re free to construct the reality we want to believe, as distinct from the reality that actually is.
I read about the “unnamed U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports” who supplied the juicy details about Jessica being shot and stabbed while emptying her magazine and killing the attacking Iraqi hordes. Or I read that part about the Iraqi lawyer who says he saw Jessica being slapped in the hospital by a sinister Fedayeen officer (with that lawyer subsequently being transported out of Iraq by US forces and granted asylum for himself and his family in Virginia). Those two parts of the story, which were so prominent in the early reporting, now appear to have been completely false. Yet I’d be willing to bet that those two mental images are the dominant features in the average Joe’s recollections of the Jessica story.
I don’t think that happened by accident. I think Bush’s people caused it to happen, cynically and intentionally, as part of the ongoing spin doctoring that is the core of what they do. Yeah, the media and the public deserve some blame for being so willing to be deceived. But so do the people who helped that process along.
June 18th, 2003 at 6:49 am
I don’t hold the Bush Administration blameless. As I mentioned, I think they allowed some of the more dramatic falsehoods to go unchecked, with only some “Gee, we’re not sure ourselves” kind of statements to the press to perpetuate the story without actually endorsing it. Pretty standard fare for any war-time government to do, I would say. But could they have stepped in at some point earlier in the frenzy and set a few details straight? Probably.
It also wouldn’t surprise me if some of these initial Intelligence reports reflected the ambiguous nature of the early days of the story anyway. The “fog of war” influences all who are involved.
But the bulk of the confusion appears to have the same origins as most big breaking stories do these days. The media scrambles to get information out so their networks don’t look like slackers to an audience that expects details “right now”. So they’ll talk to anyone willing to make a comment, either on or off the record, or they’ll cannibalize each others information.
June 20th, 2003 at 9:47 am
There is a current op-ed in the NYT called “Saving Private Jessica” that may answer your questions about the attempt to return her to the US forces in an ambulance, and that the initial BBC report on that may also be quite different in reality. Plus it adds even more detail to the story as well.
The writer still approachs the initial spin on the story as a total government scam, but I’ve already voiced my feelings on the shared culpability for the distortions of this event.
Let me add, as a side note, that I’ve read a few columnists and bloggers who wonder why Shoshanna Johnson hasn’t had much written about her capture and rescue. Of course, the race card is quickly trotted out as an explanation. I would suggest that, in her case, there has been no mystery or conflicting information surrounding the details of her rescue. You’ll notice the talk about Lynch is not so much about her as a person, but on the details of her rescue.
June 20th, 2003 at 2:37 pm
Oh, cool. Thanks. The Kristof piece in the NYT is at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/20/opinion/20KRIS.html (for now, at least).