50 Years After The Pentagon Papers: US Journalists Are Still Uncritically Reporting War Lies As Truth

Pentagon Papers Failed to Cure Servile Pro-War Media

James Bovard, Counterpunch, June 9, 2021

Fifty years ago, the New York Times began publishing excerpts from a massive secret report called the "History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy." Those excerpts, which quickly became known as the "Pentagon Papers," provided shocking revelations of perennial government deceit and spurred an epic clash over the First Amendment. Unfortunately, many of the media outlets that will celebrate the Pentagon Papers anniversary have long since become lap dogs of perfidious politicians dragging America into new foreign conflicts.

The report that became the Pentagon Papers was a secret study begun in 1967 analyzing where the Vietnam War had gone awry. The 7,000-page tome showed that presidents and military leaders had been conning the American people on Southeast Asia ever since the Truman administration. Like many policy autopsies, the report was classified as secret and completely ignored by the White House and federal agencies that most needed to heed its lessons. . . .

The Pentagon Papers should have spawned permanent, radical skepticism concerning the candor and competence of U.S. foreign interventions. Philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that the Pentagon Papers revealed how "sheer ignorance of all pertinent facts and deliberate neglect of postwar developments became the hallmark of established doctrine within the Establishment." That internal study also revealed how deceit became institutionalized.  . . .

[Daniel] Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official, risked life in prison to smuggle the report to the media after members of Congress were too cowardly to expose it. . . .

The Nixon administration claimed the president had "inherent authority" to censor news related to national security, regardless of the First Amendment. On June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the newspapers had the right to publish the classified documents. Justice Hugo Black wrote that the First Amendment protected the media because "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government." . . .

The Pentagon Papers proved that politicians and bureaucrats will brazenly con the American public into unnecessary wars. But that lesson vanished into the D.C. memory hole—conveniently for obsequious journalists like Post superstar Bob Woodward. In 2002 and 2003, the Post buried pre-war articles questioning the Bush team's hysterical allegations on Iraq. The Post's award-winning Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks complained, "There was an attitude among editors: 'Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?'" Instead, before the war started, the Post ran 27 editorials in favor of invasion and 140 front page articles supporting the Bush administration's case for attacking Saddam.

Television networks out-groveled print media. CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan boasted that he went to the Pentagon shortly before the invasion of Iraq and got "a big thumbs-up" for the generals he planned to use as cheerleaders for the war. Before the war, almost all the broadcast news stories on Iraq originated with the federal government. PBS's Bill Moyers noted that "of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS nightly news, from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department." . . .

The same elite journalists who portrayed themselves as champions of truth laughed heartily at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents annual dinner when President Bush performed a skit featuring slides showing him crawling around the Oval Office peeking behind curtains as he quipped: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere… Nope, no weapons over there… Maybe under here?" The Post headlined its report on the evening: "George Bush, Entertainer in Chief." Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor and Publisher, labeled the performance and the press's reaction that night as "one of the most shameful episodes in the recent history of the American media, and presidency." . . .

H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's White House chief of staff, warned Nixon in 1971 that the Pentagon Papers might make people believe "you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this." Unfortunately, much of the media continue to presume that presidents are infallible when attacking foreign nations. As Jon Schwarz wrote in 2016 in The Intercept, "Time and again, the Washington press corps has credulously accepted officials' lies and misinformation, and passed them on to their readers as the truth. Their real-time skepticism is almost nonexistent. And they keep doing it."

The mainstream media nowadays often show more distrust and indignation about peace than about war.  . . .

Ellsberg's courage will rightly be celebrated by many of the same media outlets that totally abandoned or condemned whistleblowers such as Assange, Manning, and Snowden. Biden's Justice Department recently coerced former intelligence analyst Daniel Hale into pleading guilty to "retention and transmission of national security information." Hale leaked documents to a journalist in 2014 and 2015, revealing that nearly "90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes [of Obama's drone assassination program] were not the intended targets" and included many innocent civilians. Hale continues to face charges of Espionage Act violations. Perhaps because most of the media continues to revere former President Obama, Hale's case has received minimal coverage. . . .

Unfortunately, much of the media nowadays prefer to trumpet official lies instead of fighting them.