The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina | Date: 28 April 2011, 07:53
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The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina
By Frank Rich
* Publisher: Penguin Audio
* Number Of Pages:
* Publication Date: 2006-09-19
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 014305905X
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780143059059
Product Description:
General Information
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Title: The Greatest Story Ever Sold
Author: Frank Rich
Read By: Grover Gardner
Copyright: 2006
Audiobook Copyright: 2006
Genre: Nonfiction
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Abridged: No
Original Media Information
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Media: CD
Number: 8
Source:
Condition: Good
File Information
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Number of MP3s: 125
Total Duration: 9:36:20
Total MP3 Size: 132
Parity Archive: No
Ripped With: CDex 1.51
Encoded With: FhG
Encoded At: CBR 32 kbit/s 22500 Hz Mono
Normalize: None
Noise Reduction: None
ID3 Tags: Set, v1.1, v2.3
Book Description
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This blistering j'accuse has vitriol to spare for George
Bush—calling him a "spoiled brat" and "blowhard"—and his policies, but
its main target is the PR machinery that promoted those policies to
the American people. New York Times columnist Rich revisits nearly every
Bush administration publicity gambit, including Iraqi WMD claims, Bush's
"Mission Accomplished" triumph, the Swift-boating of John Kerry and
the writing of fake prowar letters-to-the-editor from soldiers. He uncovers
nothing new, but his meticulously researched recap-cum-debunking—complete
with appended 80-page time line comparing administration spin to actual
events—builds a comprehensive picture of a White House propaganda campaign
to bamboozle the public, smear critics, camouflage policy disasters
and win the 2002 and 2004 elections through trumped-up security anxieties.
Along the way, he pillories a sycophantic media (Bob Woodward gets spanked
hard), spineless Democrats and an infotainment culture that happily
accommodates the Bush administration's erasure of the line between reality
and fiction. Sometimes Rich's critique of Republican politics as cynical
image-manipulation goes overboard, as in his "wag the dog" theory of
the Iraq war as a Karl Rove electoral maneuver; more often, though,
it's on target. The result is a caustic, hard-hitting indictment of
the Bush administration, timed to make a splash in the upcoming election
campaign. (Sept. 19)
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Throughout George W. Bush's presidency, no columnist has been more perceptive
than Frank Rich of the New York Times. A longtime film and drama critic,
Rich, for the past decade, has used his insights into performance and
stagecraft to explain a political culture increasingly dominated by
simulation and spectacle.
Exploring the news each week through the lens of pop culture -- the
film "United 93" or the TV show "24," for example -- Rich teases out
implications that escape straight-news pundits. The technique allows
him to illuminate not only the submerged political currents of mass
entertainment but also the theatricality of Washington politics today.-
Now Rich has written The Greatest Story Ever Sold, a gripping, witty
and devastating indictment of President Bush's reliance on public relations
to market his Iraq and counterterrorism policies. Future historians
will turn to other works -- by James Bamford, Thomas E. Ricks, James
Risen, Ron Suskind and Bob Woodward -- to understand White House and
Pentagon decision-making after 9/11. But Rich's overview will be indispensable
for grasping how Americans experienced the events of these years.
For those who have largely opposed Bush's policies, reading Rich's book
summons up familiar feelings of outrage and helplessness. Those readers
who have tipped from being Bush supporters to critics may gain some
wisdom into why they were originally led astray. And even die-hard Bushies
may appreciate this volume as a shrewd study in the history of political
PR -- if, that is, they can get past Rich's wry, withering tone.
As in his columns, Rich uses cultural touchstones such as Philip Roth's
novel The Plot Against America and the movie "Chicago" to help us see
how populist demagoguery works or how a huckster can con a press pack.
But the book's core is a survey of the White House spins and shams since
9/11, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom
cloud" scare tactics, Colin Powell's Adlai Stevenson impersonation at
the United Nations and, of course, Bush's May 2003 "Mission Accomplished"
declaration on the flight deck. Rich deftly arranges these and other
public moments alongside cases of secret government propaganda -- the
payola to working journalists, the fake "video news releases" slipped
into local TV news shows -- to construct a persuasive picture of an
administration bent on creating "our own reality," as one Bush aide
famously put it.
Rich does let a few people off the hook. He's too easy on Special Counsel
Patrick Fitzgerald, who, while fashioning himself as the second coming
of Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, has abetted the president's anti-press
campaign by jailing one reporter for not playing ball and threatening
others.
In my view, Rich lays too much blame for the free hand that Bush has
enjoyed at the door of the Fourth Estate. Rich doesn't go as far as
some other recent books that lambaste reporters as lapdogs, but he laments
that "there was only sporadic digging into the war-ennobled administration
by mainstream journalists" and that TV news "barely raised any questions
at all."
Obviously, individual outlets, including the New York Times for which
Rich writes, erred badly in overplaying claims about the menace Saddam
Hussein posed. Some Washington correspondents went native, identifying
too closely with insider sources. The tabloid tenor of most broadcast
news -- about which Rich has written brilliantly -- fanned Americans'
crudest urges.
But Rich's well-researched narrative testifies to the dogged, independent-minde-
d reporting that -- despite this oppressive climate -- revealed official
mistakes, lies and violations of law. In recounting the long trail of
administration deceptions and blunders, Rich credits the reporters at
The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the
Wall Street Journal who discovered them. He cites scoops from outlets
as diverse as Roll Call, the National Journal, the Smoking Gun, Vanity
Fair and the New Yorker. Even the generally abysmal TV news shows did
some worthy investigation, he tells us: CBS News exposed the abuses
at Abu Ghraib, and anchors such as Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw and Ted
Koppel grilled Bush and other evasive heavies at key moments.
What The Greatest Story Ever Sold illustrates is that most Americans
did not back the Iraq invasion because they were credulous, though many
were, or even because the administration was dishonest, though it was
-- reprehensibly so. In the end, notwithstanding the hype, the truth
wasn't all that hard to see; even Bush's misleading claims that Saddam
Hussein was about to acquire nukes were debunked on the front pages,
as Rich points out, before the invasion began. Yet most citizens, despite
access to evidence, chose to follow the president anyway. Rich doesn't
get into why they did so, but I think the reasons boil down to a widespread
popular desire to exorcise post-9/11 feelings of shame and vulnerability
with the nationalistic pride achieved through the exercise of military
might.
Many people who migh
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