Posted on 07/02/2004 8:56:03 AM PDT by Gritty
Suppose a white car cruises by, and one of the occupants tosses trash at the feet of six bystanders. Then, when the eyewitnesses are asked about the incident, each describes the vehicle as a green pickup. While the actual event may not merit an essay, the fact that all six observers, independently of each other, erroneously saw a green pickup would certainly be worthy of a few paragraphs. Psychologists and others would be curious about how such a thing could happen.
This is similar to the media response to a report, written by a staff member of the 9/11 Commission, that stated "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States."
The three broadcast networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC, all incorrectly interpreted this sentence to mean that there was no relationship whatsoever between Iraq and al-Qaida. The Bush administration was totally repudiated, they all said. To see the exact quotes, go to www.mrc.org. Likewise, the New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times all came to the same conclusion. How could six independent observers all be wrong, and how could they all arrive at the same incorrect interpretation?
First, let's take the time to analyze the sentence. It does not say that there was no contact between Iraq and al-Qaida. Nor does it say that Iraq and al-Qaida did not cooperate in the 9/11 attack. Moreover, it doesn't say that the commission could find no evidence, only that, in the opinion of the commission staffer who wrote the report, there was no credible evidence.
It is ludicrous to believe the commission has not seen any evidence linking Saddam to 9/11. All one has to do is walk into any bookstore and pick up a copy of Stephen Hayes' book, The Connection. Hayes presents the evidence, but he also explores the weaknesses of each piece of evidence, so readers can make up their own minds.
For example, we know that an Iraqi named Ahmed Hikmat Shakir attended a three-day meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000, with two of the 9/11 hijackers. This is assumed to be a 9/11 planning meeting. And we know that a person with the same name is listed in captured Iraqi documents as a lieutenant colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. Still, it's remotely possible that Shakir was not acting at the direction of Saddam, or that there were two Iraqi government operatives with the same name.
In an earlier column, I described a memo by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, which listed 50 points of connection between Saddam and Osama. The Kuala Lumpur meeting was one of those points. Democrats have taken the position that if they can find one of the 50 that is untrue, then the whole list is negated -- but nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, if only one of the 50 points is true, and the other 49 are utterly false, then, indeed, there was a connection between Saddam and Osama.
Let's assume that there is only one chance in five that each of the 50 connection points is true. Even at that low level, there is only one chance in 70,000 that they are all false. So, there definitely was a link, even though none of the connection points can individually stand up to a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard.
Still, the more interesting question is how did so many media outlets misread the unambiguous sentence. If two fans of opposing baseball teams watch a bang-bang play at first base, they might disagree about the play. One fan might be confident that the runner was safe, while the other fan was equally confident that the runner was out, even though they saw the play from the same angle.
But one of the fans would be wrong, and this indicates the tricks our minds can play when we fanatically wish for a certain outcome. The reason that these newspeople misinterpreted the sentence in a way that is harmful to President Bush is not because they are dishonest, and not because they are stupid; it is because they are extreme partisans -- completely unable to comprehend any information that does not help their beloved Democrats.
If the error were caused by anything other than an irreversible mental malfunction, the networks and papers wouldn't have kept repeating the error for days.
What people believe often turns out to have little bearing on what actually happened.
A poor example because psychologists have already studied such things extensively, conducted experiments, etc. and such a thing DOES happen - routinely. A roomful of students shown a short movie ending in a car accident will routinely not correctly remember which car hit which, what color the cars are, etc. a few minutes after the film.
The only conclusion that could be reach is that all these journalists majors are either illiterate and miraculously made the same error by coincidence or they are so blinded by their left-wing ideology that they saw something that they wished was there but obviously wasn't.
Actually, it is all three; the leftist presstitutes are dishonest, stupid AND extreme partisans.
There seems to be a very scary phenomenom out there, that if a lie is told long enough people start to believe it. My advice is to stop listening to them. I stopped listening to Slick Willy when he said "But I didn't inhale." What more did he need to say. That statement said volumes. But mostly it says "I will tell you what you want to hear to get what I want."
Writing in today's Times on what he calls "The Zelikow Report," Safire takes aim at the newly issued staff report that dismissed out of hand any real connection between Iraq and al-Qaida, which led to a media broadside claiming it was a conclusion of the Commission itself, which it was not. "'Panel Finds No Qaida-Iraq Tie' went the Times headline," Safire wrote. "'Al Qaida-Hussein Link Is Dismissed' front-paged The Washington Post. The A.P. led with the thrilling words 'Bluntly contradicting the Bush Administration, the commission. ... ' This understandably caused my editorial-page colleagues to draw the conclusion that 'there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and al Qaida. ...'"
Thrilling but untrue, the columnist notes. It was not the judgment of the commissioners, but merely an assertion of the "runaway" staff headed by ex-N.S.C. [National Security Council] aide Philip Zelikow. "After Vice President Dick Cheney's outraged objection, the staff's sweeping conclusion was soon disavowed by both commission chairman Tom Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton," Safire reported.
"Yesterday, Governor Kean passed along this stunner about 'no collaborative relationship' to ABC's George Stephanopoulos: 'Members do not get involved in staff reports.'"
Unfortunately, most of those listening to them are not going to listen to your advice. That requires some amount of discernment and perception.
It's naive to think that they got the commission report and either naively, stupidly, or corruptly misinterpreted this sentence.
A much more likely scenario is that the media bosses are in constant touch with the Democrat members of the commission and their staffs. You can be sure that this sentence was INSERTED IN THE REPORT by the Democrats with the premeditated intention of handling it this way, and that the Republican jerk who chairs the commission was too stupid to head them off.
The press knew that sentence would be in the report, probably a week or two before it was released. They were already to go. The use they made of it showed all the signs of an ORCHESTRATED PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN, arranged between Democratic operatives and media bosses after careful discussion and even consultation with focus groups.
We have seen this again and again over the past year. Plainly orchestrated campaigns that come of out nowhere, last a week or two, and then give way to the next orchestrated campaign. Don't think this isn't organized and planned well ahead of time. You can extrapolate the methods simply by looking closely at the results.
Notwithstanding New York Slimes, oh so sorry, the damage was done.......INTENTIONALLY
It is not a poor example at all.
The example supposes, not that every witness will reliably report what happened, but that nothing other than some hidden bias can explain how so many witnesses were wrong in the same fashion. The example doesn't propose that one witness saw a yellow car, another red, a couple saw green. The example has all six witnesses somehow seing a green car that was not present.
Mathematically, assuming that there are ten equally likely colors for a mistaken observer to "see", then the chances that all six witnesses will mistakenly "see" a GREEN car would be roughly one in a million.
The point of the article is that the liberal media suffers lottery-winning "coincidences" of mistaken reporting on a daily basis.
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