I’ve stopped watching CNN regularly because their reporting is so terrible (they’re not as bad as Fox News, but they’re trying to be), but with the recent bombings in London, I’ve had the Babble Channel on from time to time to see what’s going on in the video news world. And, as usual, once the direct reporting of the big story is over and they turn to the commentary, I can’t listen for three minutes before they say something outrageous. This time it was in a story about the Madrid train bombings last year. The story included a good amount of detail on finding the suspects in the bombing and how that investigation ended up. The reporter mentioned about how so many Spaniards took to the streets to protest terrorism, but then he went on about how they voted out of office the conservative government which had gone into Iraq despite its unpopularity–and mentioned how this was seen as a capitulation to terrorists.

In other words, after a year and more, after the story should be settled enough to be clear in retrospect, they’re still regurgitating the Bush administration spin rather than reporting the whole story; they are still intentionally editing out important, even overriding facts which put a completely different light on that election.

The conservatives did not lose the election because of the bombing; they lost it because the Spanish people were angered by the government’s attempt to play politics with the bombings. After the train attacks and just before the election, the Aznar government blamed the attacks on the ETA (Basque separatists) and withheld information about possible al Qaeda suspects and evidence that pointed away from the ETA. An ETA attack could have given more credibility to the conservatives:

Spain’s ruling Popular Party went down in defeat to the Socialists in Sunday’s national election. It did so amid accusations that the government had withheld information on the bombings in an effort to influence the forthcoming vote.

A tough line on ETA had long been part of the Popular Party’s platform. If indeed such a horrific ETA attack occurred, it would be certain to win Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s chosen successor the prime ministership. But with the Iraq war strongly unpopular among Spaniards, Islamic jihadi involvement in Thursday’s nightmare would have grave implications for the Popular Party’s votes, and it indeed did.

In short: the Spanish people voted out the Aznar government because it tried to manipulate the attack for political purposes on the eve of an election.

It was people like the Bush administration who went into high spin mode after this humiliating defeat for the so-called “coalition of the willing” (90% of the Spanish people were not “willing”). They painted the election results to say that the Spanish people caved in to al Qaeda out of fear. However, the huge anti-terror protests following the bombings showed they were spectacularly unafraid and unintimidated; far from being cowed, they were outraged and resolved.

The truth about why Aznar lost the election is not a secret, nor is the story hard to find or even disputed by any actual evidence whatsoever. It was absolutely clear why Aznar lost.

And yet, here we are, one year and four months later, and CNN is still spouting the Bush lie; the CNN reporter, who clearly looked into the story well enough to find the truth, plainly omitted the fact that the Aznar government manipulated the bombings and withheld evidence (the CNN story included details about the al Qaeda suspects, after all), and just as plainly ignored the entire scandal that changed the election.

Like I said, this is why I stopped watching CNN, and why I would be even more disgusted were I to even try to watch Fox News. Journalism has gone from reporting the truth to choosing a spin to cover–and then perpetuating it. Just like the Jessica Lynch story and the tearing down of the Hussein statue–both stories fabricated by the Bush administration, and yet knowingly swallowed whole by a willing press, who still report them as true even today–the Spain election story is yet another in the line of conservative rewritings of modern events that is maintained and preserved by these shilling media whores.