Molly Ivins' column appears each Monday in the Seattle Times [print only]. Two weeks ago her column contained some amazing lies, I wrote to Times to debunk Ivins' fallacies and ask for a retraction, I received no response. Last week her column repeated the lie from two weeks ago, and added another lie. I wrote to the Times to remind them of the first fallacy, to debunk the second fallacy and to ask for a retraction. They asked me to revise my letter for publication. I submitted a revised letter last Wednesday (5 days ago) and received this immediate response from the letters editor:
Thanks for the effort. I have another letter on this and if I see any duplication of ideas between the two, that will give me a place to edit. Otherwise, I may just let you run long. Will advise publication date.She hasn't yet advised me on the publication date and my letter has not appeared. Neither has the "another letter on this". Nor has the Seattle Times done anything else to retract the fallacies of the columnist they choose to publish. In the meantime, Molly Ivins' latest column appears in today's Seattle Times and it contains, you guessed it, some more lies. The issue is not whether or not they print my letter, or if and when it appears. The issue is whether the Times cares enough about journalistic standards and their readers to keep false and misleading statements off their own pages.
In this week's Ivins column, there is both an outright lie and a weasely non-admission of an earlier lie. First, the latter:
Right-wing commentators have ignited yet another pointless debate, this one on the burning topic of whether the administration actually told us we were going to war because Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction posed an "imminent threat." The right-wing choir is suddenly singing, "He never said imminent,' he never said imminent," (they are so very good at all singing off the same page)....It's not a "pointless debate", it's a debate about the honesty and competence of many in the opposition and the press, and "right-wing choir" "singing on the same page"? Please. Molly Ivins is herself one of those in the, uh, choir of dishonest and/or incompetent journalists who routinely distorted the administration's statements. May 8, 2003:
The excellent blogger and journalist Josh Marshall, in a column for The Hill, points out that it may be true no member of the administration ever used the words threat and imminent in conjunction. True, when asked if Iraq were an imminent threat, various spokesmen really did say, "Yes," with varying degrees of emphasis. They said the threat was "mortal," that it was "urgent," that there was "clear evidence of peril." They said that we could not wait – BUT, they did not say "imminent threat." That sure as hell reassures me that we we're not dealing with delusional leaders. Now why exactly did they tell us we were going to war?
[President Bush] said Saddam Hussein was a clear and present danger who posed an imminent threat to the United StatesAnd it doesn't matter how angry Molly Ivins is or how badly she wants to deflect attention from her own sub-standard journalism, "imminent" does not mean the same thing as "mortal".
Molly Ivins' outright lie of the week is
On Iraq, we are now in a weird new political configuration where the professional patriots who so nastily accused those who opposed this venture of being "unpatriotic" and insisted we must "support the troops" at any price are now sort of dismissing dead soldiers. Dead soldiers are not a big story – a big story is all the progress we're making in Iraq.Molly Ivins is particularly good at alluding to vague phenomena without including any details, so maybe there really is a "professional patriot" out there who dismisses dead soldiers. Who is he? Ivins doesn't say. I suspect she's still trying to milk the discredited canard about George Nethercutt, who didn't dismiss dead soldiers, but in fact, honored our fallen soldiers by reminding us that they served an important mission. In other words, Ivins told another lie and the editors of the Seattle Times and the other newspapers that publish her column are accomplices to her dishonesty.
These observations seem to apply here.
Blow wind, blow ... Molly Ivins is an opinion columnist! Opinion! She's giving her opinion, and in her opinion, the pro-war posse is a) downplaying the significance of combat casualties and b) splitting hairs over the use of the term "imminent." The educated reader knows that these are her opinions and accounts for it.
Pick any columnist - left, right, whatever - and you will find rhetorical distortions of the sort that so offend you. I guarantee it. You think every word written by Bill O'Reilly or William Safire or Richard Cohen would stand up in court?
No. But does this mean they're liars? As readers, we like opinion columnists because they provide what we think of as "the truth behind the facts." Take a good red-meat conservative who fills his column with stuff like, "liberals hate America, and they blame America first." Is this a lie? Who got quoted saying, "America, I hate it?" Does that person stand for all liberals? Which one "blamed America" first? I remember Jerry Falwell blaming American gays for 9/11; does that make him a liberal? It breaks down. It doesn't stand up. Taken literally, the whole "America-hating" caricature is a lie.
But it persists. Why? Because there's a kernel of truth in it (e.g. liberals are typically willing to criticize America, or look skeptically at power), and because people know there's more than facts to truth.
Same with GWB and the War. The FACT is that GWB never said "Iraq is an imminent threat." Many, like Ivins, believe that the TRUTH is that the administration's actions (doomsday pronouncements:("why wait till the smoking gun is a mushroom cloud?" Massive troop buildups. Dismissal of UN inspectors. Etc etc etc) all suggested that the threat was imminent, immediate, etc. What possible other reason for the most drastic action imaginable? His actions said very clearly the threat was imminent.
Or am I lying?
Posted by: beetroot on November 10, 2003 11:07 AM
I'm well aware of the distinction between and opinion columnist and a reporter and of the distinction between facts and opinions. But even opinion columnists and editorial writers will make statements of fact in order to support their opinions. I believe that anything that is published in a newspaper that appears to assert a fact should be subject to editorial fact-checking.
If Molly Ivins wants to say that the US would have been better off to leave Saddam Hussein in power, then that's obviously a statement of opinion, and if she writes that I would call her a fool, but not a liar. If she asserts as a fact, as she did the other day, that Paul Wolfowitz is the one who promised us a "cakewalk" (in quotes) then she is not a journalist but a fiction writer and her work should be labeled as such and should not appear in any news or editorial section.
Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on November 10, 2003 11:23 AMBack to the test: does Ann Coulter belong in the same fiction section?
Posted by: beetroot on November 10, 2003 12:52 PMI agree with you that the debate of the use of the word "imminent" is not pointless. It has a very clear strategic value: it distracts everyone from considering the substance of the charge that the Bush administration deliberately mislead the US and the world on the justifications and rational for invading Iraq.
Your blog is an excellent example of this. You have spent a much larger amount of space on what you call "the imminent threat canard" and how the Bush administration never technically lied than you have on how the Bush administration did or did not use misleading and/or distorted information to lead us to war.
Sure "imminent" doesn't mean the same thing as "mortal," but "a threat of unique urgency" that poses "clear evidence of peril" and "that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder” is pretty damn close to "imminent" (meaning "threatening to happen"). What's more, both White House Press Secretary Ari Fleisher and White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett have supported other people's use of the term "imminent threat." (Wolf Blitzer: "Is [Saddam] an imminent threat...?" Dan Bartlett: "Well, of course he is.") So given that Ivans opened the topic with a clear statement that no one in the administration used the exact phrase "imminent threat" it is hard to see how she is lying or distorting or dishonest.
What's easy to see is how this whole thing is a major distraction from issues that are literally life-and-death: if the Bush administration had been fully open and honest with fair and accurate characterizations of what we knew at the time, would Congress, the citizens of the US, and the countries of the UN behaved the same way and would we have the same result with respect to the US's unilateral invasion of Iraq.
Posted by: Simon on November 10, 2003 05:47 PM