http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/24992Remembering the Downing Street Minutes
Submitted by davidswanson on Sun, 2007-07-22 22:50. Media
By David Swanson
In the Marx Brothers movie "Duck Soup" which was a dark spoof of pre-war Germany, Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho) who is the Prime Minister of Fredonia, is asking his cabinet, "Any old business?" Someone says, "Yes, about the taxes ..." And Groucho says, "Nah, that's new business." Later, Groucho asks, "Any new business?" "Now, about the taxes ..." the minister says. "Sorry," Groucho cuts him off. "We handled that under old business."
Remember when Bush and Cheney's lies weren't old news?
Neither do I.
But I do remember writing the following in June 2005, and I'm moved to bring it out again to mark the 5th anniversary of the meeting that produced the Downing Street Minutes on July 23, 2002. In this remake, Dana Milbank plays Prime Minister Firefly:
The most repeated excuse by U.S. media outlets for not covering the Downing Street Minutes and related documents is that they tell us nothing new, that they're old news. This conflicts, of course, with the second most common excuse, which is that they are false. If they're false, they can't be news at all, much less old news.
So, the question arises, when was this new news? At what point did it become old news to report that Bush had decided by the summer of 2002 to go to war and to use false justifications related to weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorism? Of course, in one sense anything we discover now about secret goings on three years ago is old news – but that sense of being old news doesn't seem to spare us details of, for example, the Michael Jackson trial or the steroids in sports scandals. In those and many other cases, we're treated to news that's about old events. By that definition of old news we could have skipped Whitewater altogether.
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