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.
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.
All fair points, but I disagree. My argument is that that a 2003-style journalistic cover-up of basic facts wouldn't be possible today, and I think that's true. I'm not claiming that therefore aggressive US foreign policies or jingoistic attitudes have become impossible. The whole case for the totally unprovoked Iraq War rested on a fairly narrow set of factual assertions, which is not the case with Ukraine or China. And therefore it would have been much more vulnerable to the effects of the internet. McClatchy did excellent reporting, of which I was an avid consumer at the time. But, again, what I wrote was:
variety and competition by themselves aren’t enough. The most important factor in breaking down the old semi-Orwellian media status quo was the interactive nature of the internet. The mere fact that the truth is being told — and that your news outlet’s lies are being exposed — in some competing publication isn’t enough to compel you to tell the truth.
It’s when there’s a chorus of eagle-eyed Twitter users noisily holding your reporting up to the light of contrary evidence, day in and day out, that the lying becomes untenable.
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.
All fair points, but I disagree. My argument is that that a 2003-style journalistic cover-up of basic facts wouldn't be possible today, and I think that's true. I'm not claiming that therefore aggressive US foreign policies or jingoistic attitudes have become impossible. The whole case for the totally unprovoked Iraq War rested on a fairly narrow set of factual assertions, which is not the case with Ukraine or China. And therefore it would have been much more vulnerable to the effects of the internet. McClatchy did excellent reporting, of which I was an avid consumer at the time. But, again, what I wrote was:
variety and competition by themselves aren’t enough. The most important factor in breaking down the old semi-Orwellian media status quo was the interactive nature of the internet. The mere fact that the truth is being told — and that your news outlet’s lies are being exposed — in some competing publication isn’t enough to compel you to tell the truth.
It’s when there’s a chorus of eagle-eyed Twitter users noisily holding your reporting up to the light of contrary evidence, day in and day out, that the lying becomes untenable.