In the course of a life not nearly misspent enough, there are a few things I have learned. One thing is that little lies are often weirder than big ones.

I’m not talking about the proverbial little white lie of saying politely that you already have other plans etc. I’m talking about little lies that seem so gratuitous, so completely unnecessary, that you wonder how any individual could give up another shred of vestigial self-respect to utter them. It is a given that a guilty man in court might proclaim his innocence. With the stakes being prison or a death sentence, any human being would find the motivation to lie humanly understandable. But why do individuals, including well-placed individuals, speak falsely in a situation where the stakes are minuscule or nonexistent?

A misleading comment I heard Brit Hume make on Fox News Sunday, some months ago, stuck in my mind by virtue of its very smallness. 

I am well aware that Fox News purveyed so many misleading messages to support the cruel and unjust invasion of Iraq that singling out one tiny incident may itself seem odd.  But as I said, the very triflingness of the example is what made it stick with me.

This was during the presidential campaign. Hume was discussing politics; the particular issue may have been George W. Bush’s putative Vietnam service in the Texas Air National Guard. In any case, Hume referred to the support given by organized groups including moveon.org for raising questions.  Hume went on to say – quickly – that the group was founded back when Clinton was being investigated re Whitewater, and sniped that that was why the group was named “move on.”

Anyone acquainted with the facts, of course, knows that the group was founded as CensureandMoveOn.org. Their stated objective – stated in print, in person, and on the Internet – was not to have Clinton get off scot-free, but to have him “censured” by Congress so that everyone could get on with the nation’s business. If Hume followed Whitewater and the whole Monica thing, he probably knew this himself. Quite possibly so did all the others on Hume’s panel that morning. Nobody pointed it out. (I tried a phone call about it, but no response.)

Perhaps some of the Fox audience did not know that the group called for Clinton’s censure, so the argument could be made that this wasn’t such a small distortion after all.  But in retrospect it still seems weirdly gratuitous.

That doesn’t mean that it was entirely ineffectual. It depressed and dispirited me and, probably, anyone like me who heard it. Its smallness demonstrated yet again that even the irreducible minimum of journalistic integrity or accuracy – getting a proper NAME right – cannot be looked for from Fox News. It seemed to be yet another tiny, seemingly insignificant detail in a (loosely) systematic misrepresentation that leaves nothing to chance, that never gives a sucker an even break, and that treats the viewing public as suckers. And of course, slight as it was, it was directly in the service of the Bush White House and the Bush campaign.

Obviously someone appearing on a television discussion show is not under the same constraints as, for example, a federal judge. Still, there is such a thing as professionalism. That concepts like professionalism, integrity, and accuracy are partly socially constructed does not mean they’re nonexistent.

But thirty years of paid propaganda have paid off. Thirty years and millions of dollars funding loudmouthed bullies to scream about “liberal media” have so cowed the news and infotainment media that when an entire news organization devotes itself to the service of one branch of one administration, nobody at the Federal Communications Commission says boo about it.

I still think that the parents of the dead and wounded in Iraq have a strong case against the PNAC, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, and several other organizations that produced an avalanche of material in the airwaves and print publications, aggressively boosting an unnecessary invasion. An enormously funded and concerted media campaign to start a war, one that dwarfs William Randolph Hearst’s efforts to launch the Spanish-American War, should go down in the history books, beginning with complaints to the FCC. After all, Bush’s whole bogus “mushroom cloud” and “WMD” hocus-pocus was exactly the equivalent of yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater, on a giant scale.

In any case, try to imagine what these bullies would be saying had a television network run a frothing campaign to start a war, in support of “liberal” ideals. (Well, actually, liberty and freedom are liberal ideals, but never mind that now; they didn’t.) Imagine what they would be saying had a Democratic president, or any president besides the smarmy Bush, lied or misspoken about a nonexistent foreign threat. Imagine what some of these bullies would be saying had a television network been founded to “counteract” the “conservative media” in the first place.

Next up:  an open letter to Mr. George Soros