With great fanfare the other day, Oprah Winfrey asked James Frey a
question that mainstream journalists refuse to ask George W. Bush:
“Why would you lie?”
Many pundits and news outlets have chortled at the televised
unmasking of Frey as a liar. The reverberations have spanned from
schlock media to highbrow outlets. On Friday, the PBS “NewsHour With
Jim Lehrer” devoted an entire segment to what happened. The New York
Times supplemented its page-one coverage with an editorial that
concluded “Ms. Winfrey gave the audience, including us, what it was
hoping for: a demand to hear the truth.”
A key reality of the National Security Agency spying story is:
President Bush lied. But routinely missing from media coverage is a
demand to hear the truth.
More than two years after he started the NSA’s domestic spying
without warrants, Bush was unequivocal. During a speech in Buffalo on
April 20, 2004, he said: “Any time you hear the United States
government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a
court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking
about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court
order before we do so.”
The next day, Bush went out of his way to reinforce the same lie.
“White House briefing records show Bush made similar remarks about
the sanctity of court orders for wiretaps in a speech in Hershey,
Pa., the day after he spoke in Buffalo,” according to a front-page
article in The Buffalo News on Dec. 25, 2005.
Frey lied about his personal life in a book, and that infuriated
Oprah Winfrey. “It is difficult for me to talk to you, because I
really feel duped,” she said, confronting him in the midst of the
Jan. 26 telecast. “I feel duped. But more importantly, I feel that
you betrayed millions of readers.”
Yet the journalists who interview Bush aren’t willing to question him
in similar terms.
The president didn’t merely betray millions of readers. He betrayed
hundreds of millions of citizens.
Bush lied about basic civil liberties in the United States. Instead
of relying on euphemisms, the news media should directly confront him
with the question: “Why would you lie?”
During the “Oprah” show, while lecturing a powerful book-publishing
executive who had served as an enabler for the author’s mendacity,
Winfrey declared: “That needs to change.” But what about the powerful
news-media executives who keep enabling the president’s mendacity?
When Frey tried to weasel out of responsibility for concocting a
phony story about a root canal without anesthetic, the host
interrupted after the words “I’ve struggled with the idea of it --”
“No, the lie of it,” Winfrey said. “That’s a lie. It’s not an idea,
James, that’s a lie.”
But high-profile journalists are unwilling to confront President Bush
on national television with such clarity: “That’s a lie. It’s not an
idea, George, that’s a lie.”
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Norman Solomon’s latest book is “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com