The Media Contempt For History

Two recent deaths have generated huge quantities of news coverage and punditry. The execution of Saddam Hussein sparked numerous retrospectives on his truly evil deeds. And the passing of Gerald Ford led to widespread praise for his essential decency. But in both instances, U.S. journalism overwhelmingly showed a reflexive contempt for inconvenient history.

Hours before the hanging of Hussein, the front page of The Wall Street Journal summed up two sides of the spinning media coin. "Some wondered at the need for such haste," the newspaper reported — while "others regretted that the narrow focus of his initial trial left unexplored the full range of the decades of Hussein misdeeds, foreign and domestic."

But a fundamentally different concern about Saddam Hussein's legal gauntlet has been widespread in much of the world. Top American officials — functioning as his captors and orchestrators of the trial that condemned him to death — were careful to rule out public testimony that would implicate the U.S. government in his crimes.

After all, the murders that led to the conviction and execution of Hussein occurred more than a year before Donald Rumsfeld — representing the Reagan administration — shook the dictator's hand in Baghdad. The Washington Post reported at the time, on Dec. 20, 1983, that Rumsfeld "visited Iraq in what U.S. officials said was an attempt to bolster the already improving U.S. relations with that country."

Those relations were indeed bolstered — with U.S. aid that included sizeable agricultural-commodity credits, restoration of full diplomatic relations between Washington and Baghdad in late 1984, cooperation between intelligence agencies of the two governments, and sale of several dozen high-tech helicopters to Hussein's regime.

As this year began, it was notable that so many U.S. media outlets had no use for such facts as they looked back on the grisly career of Saddam Hussein. The Wall Street Journal was in sync with the constricted range of mainstream media outlets when it merely reported that his trial "left unexplored the full range of the decades of Hussein misdeeds." Key historical facts about U.S.

assistance to those "misdeeds" were not only excluded from the American-supervised trial — those facts were also excluded from the boilerplate American media coverage of the tyrant's demise.

While media outlets were reporting on the aftermath of Hussein's execution, the death of Gerald Ford drew enormous coverage. And soon a story was out that Ford had insisted on embargoing till after his death.

In July 2004, during an interview with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, the former president said that "I don't think I would have ordered the Iraq war." Ford said that he would have pursued other approaches, "through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever." Ford's statements remained secret for two and a half years, until he was no longer alive.

If his words had gone public when he spoke them, American support for the war would have taken a hit. But in recent days, the story of the embargoed interview hasn't dampened the media enthusiasm for the late president's hallowed decency.

Media eulogies lauded Ford as a good man, determined to do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may. But very few journalists probed the consequences of Ford's decision to keep his criticisms of the war under wraps.

In the days after his death, some commentators were so eager to praise Ford that they even tried to depict his moral cowardice with the Woodward interview as a further indication of his moral virtue.

"By speaking posthumously, Ford gave his words greater weight," Peggy Noonan wrote in her Wall Street Journal column (oddly positioned on the newspaper's "Leisure & Arts" page). "He did not insert himself into the current debate, and because he wasn't in the fight he had nothing to gain or lose, no position to defend or attack. And so he could tell the truth as he saw it."

It's best to avoid telling the truth before you die? That seems like a very strange concept — but no stranger than the contempt for history that pervades news outlets priding themselves on coverage of history in the making.

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," is now available in paperback. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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