We Could Have Used Twitter Trolls in the Run-Up to the Iraq War
In the 2002–3 run-up to war, mainstream media outlets systematically suppressed evidence that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. They couldn’t have gotten away with it in the age of Twitter.
When the Marines crossed into Iraq twenty years ago, it still existed, but just barely. You could find it in any college town and the big metropolises, but you had to purposely seek it out: in the slacker coffeeshops, the underground video stores, the countercultural bookshops. You had to read alt-weeklies like the Village Voice, but also Z magazine, sections of the Nation, and the full corpus of writings from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (my alma mater).
For lack of a better term, and at the risk of anachronism, I’ll call “it” the world of alternative facts.
At the moment the United States barreled into Baghdad, a typical American could comfortably access a maximum of, say, a dozen original sources for national and international news, give or take a few: five TV news bureaus (NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox), NPR on the radio, the three national news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report), one or occasionally two regional newspapers, plus the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. (In most localities it had only just recently become possible to conveniently find a copy of the New York Times).
All these organizations, whatever their subtle differences of political shading or editorial quality, were staffed by journalists who lived in the same cities, went to the same schools, kept abreast of one another’s work, and knew one another socially. And each of these institutions was, in one way or another, part of the Establishment.
But most important, you couldn’t talk back to them. You could try, but no one would hear you.
It was, therefore, relatively easy and surprisingly common in those days for the media to engineer the wholesale suppression of newsworthy, verifiable facts, or to embed wholly fictitious accounts of historically significant world events into the public record. And the Iraq story — stretching from the first Gulf War (1990–91) to the 2003 invasion, and focused on the saga of Iraqi disarmament — was especially fertile ground for this kind of journalistic prevarication.
[Read the rest at Jacobin.]
I find it odd that you write this given what we see around us today wrt Ukraine or China or the blowing up of Nordstream etc, etc etc. We have twitter, and substack, and youtube, and...but it is still next to impossible to widen the discussions around any of these issues, at least in the wider public domain. In fact it may be worse today. McClatchy did decent reporting about the weapons of mass destruction, or, should I say, the absence of evidence for such weapons. And they were a pretty big news outfit. But they were not the NYT or WaPo or WSJ or NPR and so their accurate skepticism did nothing. In fact, you seem to have forgotten them too. And despite this, millions marched against the war. Millions suspected the whole discussion was BS. And they were right. So, would twitter have made a difference? Not likely. Or maybe, yes, and we have seen what difference it would have made. There would have been no peace movement as activism would have meant tweeting apercus rather than marching for peace.