SO, HOW DOES THE media use the people they consider reliable sources?That was your assignment for last week. And many of you (last names starting with E or F) investigated stories quoting or otherwise referring to information from the American Enterprise Institute.
Well, here is some relevant information for you, as reported in an article from Slate:
The Iraq war was, to a remarkable extent, an AEI production. Vice President (and Hawk-in-Chief) Dick Cheney was an AEI fellow immediately before joining the Bush White House, and his wife Lynne still is. Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy and, outside of Cheney, the most robotic defender of the Iraq invasion, was an AEI fellow. So was Laurie Mylroie, the leading academic proponent of the crackpot theory that Iraq was behind 9/11. Richard Perle is an AEI scholar. So is John Bolton. So is John Yoo, the Bush Justice Department's former torture maven. When former Pentagon Deputy Secretary and Iraq hawk extraordinaire Paul Wolfowitz resigned as president of the World Bank (over a dust-up concerning a high-paying job he'd arranged for his girlfriend), where did he land as a visiting scholar? You guessed it.
So what did you learn when you researched this think tank? Did the media handle their words wisely? Did the media blindly accept their words? Was the Institute labeled as a conservative think tank?
Is there anything wrong with that?
1 comment:
What is a Hawk-in-Chief? I think there is a problem if the media just takes what this think-tank says ver batim because it is information from people with an agenda. Isn't that something that a journalist is supposed to pull to the surface?
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