Political

Today the Washington Post finally digs into what the DSM reveal about the UK's doubts about the path towards war.

I'm not sure if Jay Rosen's recent Pressthink pleas helped the Post decide to do a front page news analysis of the DSM, but it looks like there is a growing movement to reanalyze the build-up to war in Iraq -- which is good news for The Echo Chamber Project.

During the build-up, the US media largely ignored many of the controversial details of the proposed intervention that were coming in from the overseas press. But now that the war is becoming more and more of a political liability for our allies, we're starting to see a lot more dissent and leaks that are reintroducing a lot of questions about the purpose and intent of the war.

The Post distances itself from the "He Said / She Said" debate over the DSM documents by starting two paragraphs with allegations from both sides -- "Critics of the Bush administration contend" & "Supporters of the administration contend." The Post then discloses the intent of their article:

But beyond the question of whether they constitute a so-called smoking gun of evidence against the White House, the memos offer an intriguing look at what the top officials of the United States' chief ally were thinking, doing and fearing in the months before the war.

There was a lot of lively political discussion about the DSM over in the comments section of Rosen's post -- and in the last comment Rosen speculates

I think the Brits and getting them on board was a substitute United Nations for the Bush war planners & strategists. Bush was prepared to go without even the fig leaf of the UN. They figured that America plus one was coalition enough, and the British were the one.

I think Rosen's speculation is probably right, and that the historical record of US documents would bear this out if any of it is ever leaked or formally declassified. But there's already enough evidence for this by connecting the dots of the Bush Administration's rhetoric and behavior towards the UN leading up to the war...

Rosen also asks, "Put that way, how much choice did Tony Blair really have?"...

Jay Rosen's latest essay deals with why the Downing Street memos weren't originally covered by the US media, and quotes Josh Marshall as saying, "New stories have a 24 hour audition on the news stage, and if they don’t catch fire in that 24 hours, there’s no second chance."

But now with the Internet, the attention span of news editors have been extended by Internet Activism and political blogs. Rosen says that "when the second look was taken, some key editors judged themselves at fault" and concludes that this is "called winning on appeal."

There are many other stories that have broken over in Britain both before the war and after the war that have failed to break through the US media bubble, and deserve a second look and "appeal" to US editors and investigative journalists.

The US bureau chief of the Guardian of London Julian Borger describes the myopia of the US media in an interview with the Echo Chamber Project:

If a story breaks abroad, especially in Britain, and the American press haven't got there, the instinctive reaction is, "Well, Ah. Those Brits -- Who knows if it's true?" And there's almost more of a tendency to ignore the story rather than even to check it out. And I found that again and again. If a story breaks in Britain, there's almost the automatic reaction is "Ah. It's the British press. It's tabloid. It's sensational" -- which is justified in many, many instances. The tabloid press and some of the broadsheet press in Britain can be fairly wild, and a lot of unsubstantiated stories get out. But on top of that instinctive reaction of "Well, it must be sensational because it was in the British press" is a reluctance to check it out properly. Or an over-readiness to accept assurances from the institutions -- the White House, whatever -- that although -- "There's nothing to the story. It's just a British story. Ignore it." There's a lack of -- almost a lack of hunger when it comes to stories that question the Administration's position. Until, that is, the Administration was so weakened by the failure of any WMD to appear. There was almost a turning of tides sometime last year, in 2003, when you suddenly saw a greater readiness to go over these stories. It was like the herd changing direction. It was very visible.

The tide seems to be shifting again with the Downing Street Memos because they provide documentary evidence for theories about the justifications and true motivations for the war that have long been suspected but never confirmed by primary sources or documents.

Almost all of the focus in the US media up to this point has been on the question of WMD and the intelligence around it, but this is only half of the story of how the Bush Administration sold this war. The other half has to do with how they used the UN as a legal pretext for going war, and the documentary evidence has started to pour out of the UK press like a sieve.

Yesterday The London Times published yet another "Downing Street" memo -- legal advice that goes through all of the options that the United Nations could be used as a pretext for going to war in Iraq -- the Associated Press actually published the same document in PDF on Saturday.

What is clear is that the United Kingdom cares about the normative standards of International Law while the United States could care less about what the rest of the world thinks.

There are new revelations regarding the United States' controversial positions on International Law in this latest memo, but since there has never been a news peg for Iraq and International Law in the United States up to this point, then this latest memo will be inevitably be completely ignored by the US media.

But there are some revealing insights that confirm that the UK had many of the same doubts that academics have had about the legality of the war

What does this legal document transcribed by the The London Times and published in full by the Associated Press reveal about the United States and International Law?

I've been flooded this week with e-mail notices about the upcoming Downing Street Memo Congressional hearings being held tomorrow initiated by Representative John Conyers (D-MI).

I think it's interesting to watch how these progressive grassroots organizations have helped keep this issue alive through the Internet. I'll pass along all of these e-mails for you to read through down below.

I used to consume about 90 minutes of political news a day, but I've parsed that down to about 10 minutes of scanning headlines per day with the rest of my 30 minutes of spent surfing blogs covering the New Media movement.

I pick up the slack by scanning the titles of e-mails that I'm sent by a number e-mail lists (mostly progressive but a few conservative).

If more opposition Congressmen and Senators pick up on this, then this story could have legs -- especially if more documentary evidence or testimony turns up tomorrow. Otherwise this story will have a hard time breaking out of progressive anti-war circles and into the mainstream consciousness.

I personally think the Downing Street documents contain some pretty compelling circumstantial evidence that the Bush Administration never took the United Nations weapons inspection process seriously. It reinforces the hypothesis that the US only went through the UN because Tony Blair's demanded it as one of two conditions for being a part of the Coalition of the Willing -- (the other being a concrete plan for Israel & Palestine).

The UK takes International Law seriously, and the US political establishment and therefore media don't think it's all that important. But these latest memos have helped introduce these International Law issues into the US media bubble where they have been almost universally ignored leading up to the war and up to the present moment.

After the Congressional resolution passed in early October 2002, war was seen as inevitable by the US media and the inconsistencies in the Bush administration's arguments presented at the UN and the ones presented at home were largely overlooked by a myopic US media.

A more detailed overview is here and here are all of my blog postings tagged International Law.

Plenty more about the latest Downing Street developments can be found in the flood e-mails listed below...

Dr. Cline asked me to give him some more background information as to the events leading up to why I decided to start The Echo Chamber documentary project for a paper he's working on.

I told a lot of this same information to Charles Cohen when he was profiling my wife and I for the cover story on this project that was published in the Baltimore City Paper a year ago. But not all of it made it into the final story, and so I thought I'd share it here as well.

At what point did you say to yourself: "I have to do something."
Going back to April 20th, 2002, I had attended one of the first anti-war rallies in DC before the Bush Administration kicked off their PR campaign to sell the Iraq war 4 months later. This is where I heard Phyllis Bennis from the Institute of Policy Studies speak for the first time.

After this, I saw Scott Ritter's name come up a number of times online and that's why I went to go hear him talk on August 22nd when he came through Baltimore. Ritter accurately predicted that the Bush Administration was going to go to war in Iraq, and that they were going to use WMD to sell it to the American public.

Four days later, I was on vacation when I saw highlights of Cheney launching the PR campaign to sell the war in Iraq. Ritter was so eerily correct in predicting what was going to happen that I started recording C-SPAN when I returned home in September and October of 2002. I had a very strong hunch from Ritter that the Bush Administration was going to sell the war based upon questionable intelligence...

I'm posting all of the pre-war talking points from White House that I aggregated back in August of 2004.

If journalists were paying attention, then they'd realize that the Bush Adminstration was trying to scare the hell out of the domestic population with a self-defense argument while trying to claim to the UN that we already the US already had prior authorization to attack Iraq.

These two PR campaigns were often conflicting with each other, and it wasn't a very difficult task to identify that the Bush Adminstration was hellbent on going to war regardless of whatever the UN said. I make a much more convincing argument in this Overview of the Bush Administration's PR campaign to sell the war in Iraq.

It's taken the Downing Street Memo to reintroduce this concept that Bush was hellbent on going to war in Iraq -- journalists need documentary proof to be able to report on these things.

I'm trying to apply more sophisticated analytical techniques to journalism that could be used to scrub the public record and form theories that contain sets of facts over time.

It's pretty evident that the Bush Administration was more interested in using the UN inspections process as a tripwire for war than they were with actually wanting to find and disarm the prohibited weapons.

I'd suggest reading through my overview of the Bush administration's PR campaign to sell the war in Iraq
Read through these daily talking points below.
And decide for yourself...

In the spirit of "Personal Democracy," I created my own virtual conference at the Personal Democracy Forum 2005. After attending the opening talk and two morning break-out sessions, I pulled aside the following 13 conference speakers and interviewed them about emerging new media trends:

UPDATE 2/8/06: Click on the names below to listen to the interview -- or use this Interview Audio feed to download all of the interviews.

	Markos Moulitsas	DailyKos
	Jeff Jarvis	Buzzmachine.com
	Hugh Hewitt	HughHewitt.com
	Dan Gillmor	Grassroots Media Inc. Author of We the Media UPDATE: Center for Citizen Media
	Chris Nolan	ChrisNolan.com UPDATE:Spot-On.com
	Halley Suitt	Halley's Comment Blog
	Rebecca MacKinnon	RConversation & Global Voices Online
	Doc Searls	Doc Searls Weblog
	Mindy Finn	Republican National Committee Deputy eCampaign Director
	Sheldon Rampton	PRWatch.org & SourceWatch
	Christopher Rabb	Afro-Netizen
	Scott Heiferman	Co-Founder and CEO of Meetup.com
	Hossein Derakhshan	Hoder.com

I captured about 2.25 hours of interview footage by lurking around outside the conference rooms from noon until 7 p.m. I definitely had a unique conference experience, and I plan on cutting together some highlights and open-sourcing the audio of the interviews soon.

With so many new media luminaries at one place and one time, I thought that it'd be a shame to pass up the opportunity to get their predictions on the record for how they see the evolution of media, politics and culture.

Nearly everyone seemed to agree that things are changing so fast that it's really hard to predict exactly what is going to happen.

The emergence of blogs and podcasts have already made lightening quick impacts on politics and culture.

There are even more changes afoot with the technological infrastructure and tools such as CivicSpace & Drupal that have the potential to really empower the grassroots. The public will soon become a powerful institution in it's own right.

I pretty much talked with everyone that I targeted except for two:

Josh Marshall wanted to do an interview but was swamped with all of the irons he has in his fire. He said to e-mail him to try to do a quick interview on Tuesday, but he evidently was too swamped since I never heard back from him.

Arianna Huffington also seemed willing to do an interview, but I couldn't pin her down between running between her panel, Reuters, CNN, personal meetings, phone calls, etc.

pdf2005

Keywords

* Scaling Deliberative Democracy
* Democratizing Media
* Drupal Modules

Context

* The gathering and analysis of information from the previous phase feeds into this deliberative phase. I imagine that there will be iterations between the analysis of facts and deliberations surrounding the subjective interpretations of facts.

Intention

* Use insights from Dialogue and Deliberation in order to mediate disputes between conflicting parties.
* Use the deliberative process to "Democratize" the process of narrative content development.

I thought that it would be appropriate to comment on what I thought about the Iraqi elections as well as my personal views on the war in Iraq. What does Iraq's election mean for this documentary, and for recruiting a wide range of volunteers to help collaborating on a project about a very politically and emotionally-charged issue?

The Echo Chamber documentary analyzes the performance of the media during the build-up to the war in Iraq. Some may say, "The Iraqi elections were held yesterday, and going to war in Iraq and deposing of Saddam was a good thing. Why are you doing a documentary on the media during this time period?"

As I reflect on how this documentary started and where it has ended up, I notice how much it has evolved. I have been writing up synopses and talking to a number of people about the project, and I realize that there is some confusion about the motivations and intentions of The Echo Chamber.

Is the film is going to criticize the politics of the selling the war to the American people and serve as a thinly-veiled attack on President Bush? Or is this a serious academic investigation of the downfalls of objective mainstream journalism?

ORIGINAL MOTIVATIONS

As I continue to focus the goals of this project, I have drafted up some ideas as to how to characterize the needs of the current market:

* The mainstream media shapes political discourse in ways that are often unseen, and is therefore accused of having either a political or economic bias.
* Claims of liberal media bias have created a deep distrust of objective mainstream news and increased the demand for a more alternative and partisan press.
* The political discourse is becoming increasingly politically polarized and partisan, and the two parties are talking at each other and not to each other.