Well, I'm sorry for the BBC, and being the BBC, I imagine they went on air to publicly disavow the lies they'd been told (and broadcast). Unlike ANY major American media source I can think of, they take pride in their work, and realize that people depend on them.

Today, the LA Times has two big front page stories on Basra, which astounded me.

The stories aren't quite consistent with each other, but the upshot is that Basra is under Iraqi control because the coalition decided last week to bypass it. As of yesterday, we were told that Basra was under "coalition control" (why not "British control"? I don't know).

Meanwhile, the stories explain why refugees haven't been leaving Basra--the Fedayeen are apparently firing on them, killing women and children on the middle of a bridge (a bridge which yesterday we were told was firmly under our control).

At the same time, we're also told that people are entering Basra from the surrounding countryside to get food and water--despite the fact that they're still reporting that Iraq is no longer supplying Basra and the Fedayeen are preventing the British from doing so.

If the only source of news I had were the LA Times, here's how I'd be forced to piece this all together:

A week ago, the coalition decided to bypass Basra. However, they somehow ended up in control of the surrounding area instead, cutting it off from Baghdad, and decided to start sending in humanitarian supplies. They haven't been able to do so, but the people in the surrounding area would still rather starve to death in Basra than live under coalition control. The story of the Fedayeen massacring civilians is speculation in the face of complete bewilderment about explain why there's nobody going the other direction.

Of course this reconstruction is probably not much closer to the truth than either of the stories it's based on.

What bothers me most about this isn't that the US media prints the Pentagon's lies uncritically, it's that neither the Pentagon nor the media feels that they're under any compulsion to keep the lies plausible or consistent.

There's a complete distain for the truth and for the intelligence of the American people, as if they're saying to us, "Well, everyone already knows we're lying about everything, and there's nothing they can do to stop us, so why should we even keep up the pretense of honesty?"

That's the key difference between W. and his predecessors in the Reagan/Bush/Clinton administration: They didn't have any more morality, integrity, honesty, or responsibility, but at least they had the civility or honor to play the game the way it's supposed to be played.

The press is doing the same thing. Somewhere along the way, Fox News figured out that ridiculous fictions played just as well as plausible lies, and they're much easier to fabricate, so why even try? And now the rest of the media are following along.

During the Gulf War, I remember the LA Times giving us the results of their "investigative journalism," which provided a different cover story for the Bush-Hussein connection when they found the official story too hard to stomach. This time around, they've printed W.'s even more ridiculous about the bin Laden-Hussein ties word for word off the press release.

There's been an epidemic of this kind of thing over the past 20 years--the Asian currency markets, Internet spam, Enron, it's all the same thing. Someone learns that it's all a game, and that it only works because everyone agrees not to cheat, and then realizes that he can cheat and get away with it.

Nobody in this country has any shame.

I've got it - this is the Weekly World News administration.

That's almost a perfect analogy, and I can't believe I never thought of it. Especially considering the history of the Weekly World News.

The WWN was the offspring of the Enquirer. The Enquirer threw surplus resources at it as a tax loss, expecting that it would never amount to anything. Who would read a tabloid whose stories were too implausible even for the Enquirer?

Of course the WWN turned out to be an unexpected success. But not enough of a success--they got into trouble for falsifying poll results to claim that it was the most popular black&white tabloid in the country--and in the end, they got away with it.