McBride Media Watch

I just had the fortune, or misfortune if you will, to listen to amateur hour on 620 WTMJ radio. Actually, it was the Jessica McBride show, but it is understandable why one might confuse her show with open mic night. The topic of the show concerned the recent news of Saddam Hussein’s execution. This inexorably devolved into a discussion on the Iraq war, and led me to believe WTMJ held a radio host audition tonight.

According to her profile, Mrs. McBride “comes to WTMJ with strong credentials” and “[s]he won national awards for her investigative reporting.” However, she failed to do anything beyond superficial investigating this evening and proved she lacks nuanced thought and reasoning. When a caller stated that the United States propped up Mr. Hussein and helped create the conditions in Iraq, she responded by asking: “Do you hate America.” Take a second to follow her ‘linear though’ as she put it. Mrs. McBride, along with countless other conservative talk show hosts, simply fails to realize that questioning America and hating America are two very different things. Furthermore, the simple fact remains that America is not blameless. Despite what some conservative pundits may say, America’s actions and foreign policy has consequences or blowback, and not all of it is positive. Rather than taking the pedestrian view that al-Qaeda attacked us because they hate our freedom and democracy, we need a broader examination into the rationale behind the attacks. A cursory example of this sort of scholarship would include a reading of Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban, which examines the effects of the United States encouraging jihadists to flood into Afghanistan in support of the Mujahideen’s war against Soviet Russia. Rashid believes this concentration of miscreants and nefarious outlaws created a veritable powder keg in Afghanistan just waiting to explode. While the US foreign policy is not a sufficient explanation for terrorists’ attacks, it is a necessary condition. Furthermore, to argue otherwise is simply ignorant and short-sighted.

Second, when confronted with the appropriateness of the war, Mrs. McBride, not like many of her cohorts retorts: “Democrats and liberals alike supported and voted for the war.” While I cannot argue with the validity of this statement (John Kerry, Hilary Clinton, et al), she nonetheless deceived her audience. It is tantamount to me saying Charles Lindbergh believed Hitler was a hero, because at one point he supported the Nazi Party. It also is not simply an issue of hindsight being 20/20. Just as the Nazi’s distorted lied about many of their intentions in the 20s and early 30s, the Bush administration lied and distorted the truth regarding the situation in Iraq. The real hindsight gained is to not trust the Bush administration. Had the democrats received accurate facts regarding the likelihood of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and still authorized the use of force, then hindsight would be appropriate to describe their current misgivings of this conflagration. However, Congress never received an actual assessment of Iraq’s danger to the United States. When Secretary of the Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of the State Colin Powell tell Congress and the American public the specific locations of the weapons, it is easy to understand why some Democrats were hoodwinked into supporting the war. Mr. Rumsfeld: “We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat (March 30, 2003).” And again on September 18, 2002 before congress, “[Saddam] has amassed large clandestine stocks of biological weapons.” And, “There is no question but that they would be welcomed," Rumsfeld replied, referring to American forces (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/rumsfeld_2-20.html). "Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the al-Qaeda would not let them do.” Finally, the most horrendous lie. President Bush: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them" (http://www.whitehouse.gov/g8/interview5.html). To say Democrats supported the war is true, but only half of the story. They supported the war based on lies and deliberate distortions. While they should have done their due diligence, Mrs. McBride and others of her ilk are unfair and deceitful when they state that even democrats supported the war.

Mrs. McBride, I think you should stop teaching journalism, and return to school to take some classes of your own. Then again, isn’t there an old phrase, ‘those who can’t, teach.’ Maybe I’m just expecting too much from her.