...ma se la radio e' libera - ma libera veramente...

...piace ancor di più perché libera la mente, cantava in illo tempore Eugenio Finardi.



Negli USA sta nascendo un caso intorno non alla radio, ma in generale ai media "liberi": significativo questo articolo apparso su USA Today e intitolato "Where are Democrats and the media — now that Bush may have been right?"

Lost in the cheering over the John Edwards pick and the cacophony following President Bush's refusal to speak at the NAACP convention this past week were reports that Bush might have been right after all when he said that Iraq had sought uranium for nuclear weapons.



Bush was forced to back off the assertion, made in his 2003 State of the Union speech, after Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador to the West African nation of Gabon, concluded that it was highly doubtful that any such Iraqi effort to buy uranium ever took place.



In a July 6, 2003, op-ed piece in the New York Times, Wilson suggested the reports were based, in part, on "probably forged" documents. And he charged that the Bush administration "twisted (the intelligence) to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."



Wilson's charges, embraced by Democrats and publicized far and wide by a news media all too willing to believe the worst about Bush, were given great credence because Wilson was the man chosen by the CIA to investigate the suspected Iraqi effort.



By his concluding that the Iraqi uranium-buying attempt was pure fiction, it gave critics of the war in Iraq one more chance to call Bush a liar and say he took the United States into battle under false pretenses.



Thus, Wilson became a great hero. And the laurel-leaf crown on his head became thicker and shinier when allegations arose that someone in the White House, in apparent retaliation against Wilson's whistle-blowing, leaked to newspaper columnist Robert Novak the fact that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA agent.



That further inflamed the Bush critics, touching off cries for a full criminal investigation into the leak. That probe is under way.



Time magazine put the saintly Wilson on its cover last October. Wilson subsequently wrote a book about the whole nasty business, depicting himself and his wife as martyrs in the cause of truth. That set off a whole new round of media swooning. For two weeks in May, Wilson was everywhere.



But now, two reports have surfaced that suggest Wilson might have been wrong, and Bush might have been right in saying Iraq tried to buy uranium in the African nation of Niger.



The first came in the widely ballyhooed Senate Intelligence Committee report, which earlier this month concluded that much of the intelligence Bush relied on to make his case for war against Iraq was faulty.



It also found that Wilson's investigative trip to Niger in 2002 actually "lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal."



Second, the Senate report said that Wilson "was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly."



Wilson, in several media interviews, denied that his wife had anything to do with suggesting that he undertake the mission.



ABC News' Ted Koppel, on the Sept. 30, 2003, edition of "Nightline" asked Wilson, "Did your wife propose to her CIA colleagues that they call her husband, you?" Wilson replied, "No."



Further knocking down Wilson's case was this past week's release of a British board of inquiry report into intelligence leading up to the Iraq war. "The British government had intelligence from several different sources" that Iraqi officials tried to buy uranium from Niger in 1999. "The intelligence was credible," the report said.



But now that the Wilson case has been debunked, it is interesting to note that the news media, so eager to build him up, and tear Bush down, now seem reluctant to tell the rest of the story, or at least the next chapter. Wilson, who had been a fixture on television, now seems to have disappeared. Democrats are silent.



Why were the media so willing to believe Wilson when he was an obvious Democratic partisan? He not only worked for the National Security Council in the Clinton White House, he also is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic presidential campaign of John Kerry. Why, indeed?

Già: why? (domanda retorica, ovvio).



Proprio vero: tutto il mondo è paese, anche quando si parla di dis-informazione e di palese malafede - pare di leggere, pari pari, le polemiche nostrane sul comportamento di certa televisione (Rai 3 in testa) e di certa stampa (da "Repubblica" giù giù fino all'Unità e al Nazifesto).