Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence.
Setting that aside, there's a big difference between an institution like the NY Times getting it wrong on occasion, despite all their research and fact checking, vs an institution like Facebook building a platform that systematically rewards disinformation at massive scale.
Within hours of the planes hitting the towers on 9/11, before any information was in, Rumsfeld's aides were drawing up plans for striking Iraq, despite zero evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks. The number one priority for the White House, above finding out who the real culprits were, was to figure out how to use it as a rationale to invade Iraq. This is not really a controversial viewpoint, it is documented fact [1].
When the 9/11 rationale for invading Iraq became untenable, it was replaced by the idea that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction, that he'd definitely been procuring uranium from Niger. Except these were lies too (and the WH knew it, because they'd sent Joe Wilson to investigate and he'd reported back as such). When Wilson heard them saying it despite knowing it was false, he contradicted them in public [2]. In an act of retribution, the WH leaked his wife's position as a CIA agent, burning valuable contacts and networks, and endangering friendly lives.
Then they moved onto the argument that regardless of WMDs, the Iraqi people actually wanted the invasion anyway, US forces would be welcomed as liberators by gift-bearing citizens, etc. When that didn't pan out either, a final argument became that Saddam was a tyrant and that fact alone provided sufficient moral and legal justification for preemptive war (i.e. The Bush Doctrine) [3].
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49856792
[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/why/
This is not even close to a comparable situation to the social medial platforms, these platforms and democratized and weaponized mis-information. But it not just them, the ad-funded internet creates perverse incentives for views not truth, FB et al don’t care about truth they care about engagement, they know emotional touch points particularly angry drive engagement so their feeds optimize for that.
Our fractured society is just an emergent behavior from several complex systems with poor incentives, as such we need to find out a way to realign the incentives
That was the case in Afghanistan, but not in Iraq. There were significant protests against the planned invasion.
Gallup polling shows 50-60% of Americans supported going in just to remove Hussein, in the first half of 2003 only 23-27% of Americans thought it was a mistake to go in to Iraq. see here for tons of polls done https://news.gallup.com/poll/1633/iraq.aspx
Despite seemingly everyone's revisionist histories, the country was scared and generally whipped into a frenzy, the right wanted it, the centrists wanted it, some of the left wanted it.
Yes that's what is discussed above: who did the whipping, and how they did it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/iraq-war-...
Now for more context why I did this: Back then when Bush started pushing for the war, I immediately considered him a liar, I am not from US, and from my perspective and from many people where I live, it was blatantly obvious he was lying, for example some of the "evidence" he used was obviously bullshit, like his description of satellite photos on UN, or saying that WMD was found in certain places right after UN inspectors visited those places and said they found nothing there.
Sometimes I wonder how people from USA don't see how evil they country is, for example when Brazil said they would vote against the war in the security council, John Bolton just went and threatened his family (his exact words were: "I know where your kids live."), while the rest of the world was horrified by the lies spouted by US media, the US public was cheerily supporting the warmongers, in some cases even more than needed, for example some public polls done at the time found out a majority of the population were in favor of the wars, in Afghanistan case some people even agreed with the assertion that USA should "glass" afghanistan.
This is outrageous. You can be enemies but family is forbidden area.
There were literally UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, and the "intelligence" couldn't guide them to a single weapon [1].
It was widely reported, even before the invasion, that the intelligence had been "sexed up" [2] - such as the inclusion of claims that WMDs could hit the UK within 45 minutes. Of course the politicians in charge knew the intelligence had been sexed up - they ordered it.
There are also memos agreeing to invade regardless of whether WMDs could be found [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hans_Blix&oldid=1...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=September_Dossier...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bush%E2%80%93Blai...
Conspiracy theories are often just grift. And the same thing applies, only on a bigger scale.
Iraq and Afghanistan were immensely profitable for certain actors - some of whom are well known, some less so.
I watched the presentation of "evidence" and thought "Who is going to believe THAT?!". "We did not really see-see anything, but here is some CGI of truck-based weapons labs that we somehow believe might exist". It was rather ridiculous, really.
It was so unconvincing, I can only assume that it was intentional sabotage by some actors with remains of integrity.
There's bad intelligence, and there's intelligence so bad and with evidence so thin or nonexistent that you know it's a fabrication.
[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2003 [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656
It's called power. Journalists are people, and desire power just as much as the next politician, CEO or movie star. Unlike those, journalists get that power by controlling broad narratives and having disproportionate control over the free flow of information.
It's an immense power that has evolved alongside modern democratic society and we have developed strong accountability mechanisms. Strong peer pressure and integrity requirements control that journalistic power.
Social media and the internet are recent invention that lack that evolved institutional and social framework. They are stripping power from the elites specialized with controlling that flow, and putting control in the hands of tech firms and anonymous "content optimization engineers" that make the algorithms work. They are only accountable to the bottom line.
So yes, it's a power struggle and huge double standards at work, only we shouldn't assume every revolution and upheaval of the traditional social order works for the benefit of the people.
Hell, I've just watched the media over here in the UK create a fuel supply crisis through irresponsible reporting - they posted breathless headlines about petrol stations running out of fuel and having to close which actually created the crisis by scaring everyone into going out and filling up their tanks at once. In reality, about five stations in the country were shut prior to the panic buying - so few even the people who'd tried to go to one probably wouldn't realize there was meant to be a crisis. But our fuel supply chains just don't have the capacity to cope with everyone buying several times as much as usual once the press started a panic. Is there any accountability for this? Of course not. They just kept on running endless sob stories about the people affected by the crisis and how terrible it is for them, making money off suffering they created.
The mainstream media very much got it wrong on Iraq. I agree with you. Yet the reality is more complex than your anti-elitist tirade suggests.
It's inconceivable to me that a well-functioning democracy can exist without trustworthy--and trusted--institutions who (yes) have an outsized influence on public opinion. The policy issues faced by citizens in a modern democracy are too complex to expect everyone to "do your own research."
So the question is, how do we foster those trusted institutions? How do we hold them to account when they go wrong? And how do we make them more deserving of our trust?
If the answer is, "We won't, but at least we'll have an algorithm that rewards CTR", well...I respectfully disagree.
Word clouds are silly and a bit out of fashion, but very useful to find common rhetoric. If there is a dissonance between reporting and common users, you might have found content that is more of a suggestive nature.
There was and is a lot of that. Maybe popular writers just have common groups for information interchange. That on its own can be detrimental because the number of perspectives shrinks.
Complexity isn't an excuse. Legislative frameworks have a tendency to get more complicated since they often lack mechanism to deprecate unfitting laws, but overall complexity didn't really increase. It is an excuse and rationalization for these kind of lies. Projection of hegemonial power and securing strategic resources isn't complicated.
Undermining trust has to be an existential threat of newspapers. Many people are slow learners but they learn.
The common journalists is a pretty poor slob and the economic situation of newspapers is pretty grim. It was also a "safe" option to lie on Iraq. But what can be just as a large problem is when journalists a easily impressionable.
The glib answer is, "They publish corrections." Which many do.
But I don't think that addresses the (valid) criticism about the Iraq invasion: while there were some errors of fact, there were primarily errors of omission, where the media were too willing to act as uncritical stenographers for politicians' claims.
We see, in a way, the same phenomenon in the Trump era: whatever lunatic allegation Trump or his acolytes would make, the media felt the need to cover it; after all, whatever the President says is inherently news, no matter how crazy.
Yet in both of these examples, the problem isn't that the media represent some sort of powerful cabal, which I think was what the OP implied: it's that the media are too spineless to truly hold to account those in power (in both cases, the President of the US). Viewed that way, the premise of the original question is incongruous: it's deeply strange to criticize only the "Princeton and Columbia"-educated "media elites" who too-uncritically reported on the claims of the President, and not the Yale- and Harvard-educated President (and son of a President)--or the billionaire heir to a fortune President who came later--who uttered those false claims.
The media absolutely deserve to be criticized for their uncritical reporting before the invasion of Iraq, as I said before, but the original criticism sounded like we want a weaker media who will be less able to question false narratives espoused by powerful players. And I think if you look at these stories more closely, you'll realize we want the opposite.
IMO the problem of public trust in institutions has one answer: democratic accountability. In the US, the news media claims to be the watchdog of our society, and to act in the public interest, but there are no mechanisms for public accountability. Who decides what topics should be covered? Who decides what angle to take? Who decides what makes the front page? Who decides whether something is newsworthy or not?
None of these decisions are made with any connection to the public that the media purports to serve. In fact, the lack of connection to the public is considered a virtue. Journalists legitimize themselves by claiming to be neutral, objective, rational, principled, virtuous, beholden only to the truth and above the fray of partisanship and self-interest that warps the opinions of the public. So the media claims to be legitimate and trustworthy, not because it has democratic accountability—but because it does not.
The fundamental premise of the institution of the media is that democracy is fatally flawed and the public can't be trusted. That's why what's happening on social media is characterized as a problem of misinformation and public susceptibility to propaganda—the cure is greater control of information by a credentialed elite. Bt the real problem of social media is that a small percentage of the population are able to gain influence because the US electoral system grants them disproportionate power. Social media is a way of coordinating a political movement, not fundamentally an issue of truth and lies.
The problems in our society and on social media come from too little democracy. The media represents them as problems of too much democracy, and that tells you everything you need to know about their basic political commitments.
Frances Haugen's twitter bio says "We can have social media that brings out the best in humanity." Who decides what is the best of humanity? This won't be a democratic process, but yet another elite group of purportedly neutral and objective "experts and academics" from expensive universities. I can barely imagine a darker authoritarian project than to try to get private social media companies to manage the thoughts and feelings of their users so that it meets with elite approval.
I don’t think most journalists would accept the view you attribute to them—that they are opponents of democracy—but the logic seems like it applies to any expert specialization. Is that your argument—that all experts are inherently opponents of democracy because they “tell us what to think?”
Assuming the problems of voter participation are solved, I would like to see publicly funded journalism and the position of editor-in-chief as an elected position.
My criticism of US journalism is that they lay claim to legitimacy by being above the rabble. That is why they are able to decide what's in the best interests of the country. That's a claim to 1) a political role based on 2) an anti-democratic premise. I don't know of any expert specialization which makes a similar claim.
Or should there be more direct political influence, as you suggest—NPR, but the editor in chief is elected every four years? That seems deeply problematic, for somewhat obvious reasons.
I mean ... there was a joke at a time - how does the USA knows about the WMD - they keep the invoices. Saddam was a product of US and everyone in the know knew exactly what he was having. I am not sure that there was a convincing of the Congress since everyone knew to and they were just playing theater. The neocons pitched successfully invasion, but the US had a strong bipartisan desire for powerbase in the middle east. The rest was show for the public.
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i...
Don't blame NYT, they are just like proverbial broken clock which displays correct time twice per day. WMDs from Hussein's stockpile were still used in Syrian War until recently by Baath Socialist militants, the pathway for sarin is pretty clear.
All of the problems of Facebook and social media are just problems of the media in general. Misinformation? Conspiracies? Social comparison? Outrage-driven content? Body image issues? All rampant in the mainstream press, but no journalists are calling for regulation of their industry.
If you were to propose federal regulation of the New York Times, journalists would object and talk about the first amendment, the 4th estate and the need for a free and independent press. It's an elitist double standard with content controls for the masses and first amendment rights for the graduates of Princeton and Columbia with jobs at prestigious publications.