01-15-2017, 01:26 AM
(01-14-2017, 07:52 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(01-14-2017, 04:37 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Where were the New York Times' fact-checkers in the lead-up to the Iraq War?
Official sources in the United States, a/k/a the Public Record, have traditionally been safe. Such official information as arrests, criminal indictments, jury verdicts, births, marriages, deaths, and wartime casualty lists are ordinarily definitive. On such items, nobody ordinarily needs to fact-check the data. (Although I do genealogy, and I once found a man who died of uterine cancer according to the public record -- obviously, someone put a woman's death record in the place of his. But transposition errors, misspellings, and typos happen all the time. We can;t afford to be too literal.
Official statements of elected public officials and appointees have generally been reliable. Deceit and delusion can make such statements suspect. I am tempted to believe that most people believed that the successor of Washington and Lincoln would not lie to start a war. As the reality leaked out, distrust in government increased.
I think we can accept that the disclosure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq degraded mass trust in the government for its veracity to the detriment not only of Dubya, but also of President Obama. People had to start testing what they heard not against some standard of objective fact, but instead what they already believed, which reflects the extreme polarization that bedevils American political life. If one is a liberal one generally believes Barack Obama. If one is on the Right, one generally distrusts practically everything that he says.
The distrust that Americans have in public officials will not likely ameliorate shortly.
Interesting that you bring up WMD. The belief in WMD was largely fueled by a series of New York Times articles published in the leadup to the Iraq War. I think that's what Someguy is referring to. Look up Judith Miller on Wikipedia for more details.