The Iraq Follies
Eighteen things you’ve already forgotten about the media’s flawed coverage of Iraq.
In putting together my new book, So Wrong for So Long, on Iraq and the media, I revisited the good, the bad, and the ugly in war coverage from the run-up to the invasion through the five years of controversy that followed. Even though I monitored the coverage closely all along, I was continually surprised to come across once-prominent names, quotes, and incidents that had faded to obscurity. Here is a list of 18 of those nearly forgotten episodes, in roughly chronological order.
1. The day before the invasion, Bill O’Reilly said, “If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it’s clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation; I will not trust the Bush administration again, all right?”
2. Phil Donahue lost his show at MSNBC, he later claimed, because he did not wave the flag enough. A leaked NBC memo confirmed Donahue’s suspicion, noting that the host “presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war…. At the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
3. After the fall of Baghdad, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared, “We’re all neocons now.”
4. The same day, Joe Scarborough, also on MSNBC, said, “I’m waiting to hear the words ‘I was wrong’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians, and Hollywood types.”
5. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman wrote, “As far as I am concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war…. Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons.”
6. President Bush’s comedy routine during the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2004, included a bit about the still-missing WMD. While a slide show of the president scouring the White House was projected on the wall behind him, he joked, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere…Nope, no weapons over there…Maybe under here?” Most of the crowd roared, and there was little criticism in the media in following days. Mother Jones‘ David Corn, then Washington editor of The Nation, was one of the few attendees to criticize the routine. Corn wondered if they would have laughed if Ronald Reagan had, following the truck bombing of our Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241, said at a similar dinner, “Guess we forgot to put in a stoplight.”
7. Who was the first mainstream editor/columnist to call for a U.S. pullout? It was the unlikely Allen H. Neuharth, founder of USA Today, who is certainly not known for expressing anti-war or liberal views. His May 2004 column drew wide reader protest but “the old fighting infantryman” (as the former soldier billed himself) stuck to his guns and penned a few more columns in that vein in the years that followed.
8. When the New York Times carried its now-famous editors’ note on May 26, 2004, admitting some errors in its WMD coverage, it appeared on page A10 and Judith Miller’s name was nowhere to be found. The note is often described today as an “apology,” but it was no such thing. On the day it ran, Executive Editor Bill Keller, not exactly chastened, called criticism of the Times‘ coverage “overwrought” and said that the main reason it even published the note was because the controversy had become a “distraction.”
9. Likewise, it’s often said that the Washington Post also issued an apology. But the criticism of its prewar coverage came not in an editors’ statement but in an article by the paper’s media critic, Howard Kurtz. Post editors offered several defenses for the coverage and top editor Len Downie argued that it didn’t make much difference anyway, because tougher coverage would not have stopped the war.
10. Stephen Colbert’s routine at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April 2006 is remembered for the in-his-face mockery of President Bush-but he also spanked the press, perhaps one reason his mainstream reviews were mixed at best. Addressing the correspondents directly, Colbert said, “Let’s review the rules. The president makes decisions; he’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell-check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know-fiction.”
11. In one of the purest “my bads” of the war, Fox News’ John Gibson ripped Neil Young after the rocker released his protest album Living With War. Gibson demanded that Young go see the new United 93 movie and even offered to buy his ticket. Young, it was soon pointed out, had actually written one of the first 9/11 songs-”Let’s Roll,” about, you guessed it, Flight 93.
12. Surprise: David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, and Oliver North all came out against the “surge” last January after it was announced by President Bush. George Will wrote a column titled, “Surge, or Power Failure?” And, after the botched hanging of Saddam, Charles Krauthammer declared, “We should not be surging American troops in defense of such a government.”
13. When Valerie Plame finally testified before Congress in March 2007, much of the media coverage focused on her appearance. Mary Ann Akers wrote a piece for the Washington Post titled “Hearing Room Chic,” noting that Plame wore “a fetching jacket and pants” and should be played by Katie Holmes in the movie version of her story because they both favor Armani.
14. On March 27, 2007, John McCain, referring to the supposed calm settling on Baghdad, said, “General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed Humvee.” This turned out to be pure bunk, but McCain quickly visited Iraq to try to prove his overall point. There, the Arizona senator went from the ridiculous to the maligned, touring a Baghdad market and claiming all was safe-while troops surrounded him and helicopters twirled overhead. Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) likened the scene to “a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.”
15. In April 2007, CBS’ Bob Simon admitted to Bill Moyers that his network should have dug deeper into the false claims on WMD. “I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it, in a way, almost light-if that doesn’t seem ridiculous,” he said.
16. Contrary to popular belief, the New York Times, which had editorialized against the invasion, did not call for a change in course or the beginning of a withdrawal from Iraq until July 8, 2007.
17. On Meet the Press in July 2007, David Brooks declared that 10,000 Iraqis a month would perish if the United States pulled out. Bob Woodward, also on the show, challenged him on this, asking for his source. Brooks admitted, “I just picked that 10,000 out of the air.”
18. Also in July 2007, an old clip of a C-SPAN interview with Vice President Cheney from 1994 surfaced, in which he defended the decision not to depose Saddam Hussein during Gulf War I: “Once you got to Iraq and took it over…then what are you going to put in its place?…It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.” He explained, “And the question for the president…was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.”
Greg Mitchell is editor of Editor & Publisher and the author of So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits-and the President-Failed on Iraq (Union Square Press), which was published this week.
© 2008 The Foundation for National Progress
US investigative journalism: MIA.
Since one of the propaganda refrains of administration apologists is that “everyone” got it wrong about Iraq, I think a useful corrolary to this project would be to assemble a list of those who got it right. People like Robert Dreyfuss, over at the American Prospect, and Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay at Knight-Ridder, and even Donahue, who was fired because of it. Plenty of people got it right before there was ever even any invasion. I wrote about it for months at my own website, using their work as the basis for my own commentary:
http://claslib2.tripod.com/lh/archive.html
Former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter is another who got it right before the war. In fact, David Kay, who started the “we were all wrong” claptrap, was imported into the corporate press coverage in the lead-up to the war as a counter to Ritter. The press needed a “former chief weapons” inspector to toe the line on starting a war, and he was their boy, in spite of the fact that he’d only been “chief weapons inspector” for a few months, many years earlier, at the very beginning of the disarmament process (Ritter had held the post for years). Ritter got it right, Kay was all wrong, and, after the war, declared that everyone was all wrong.
“When the New York Times carried its now-famous editors’ note on May 26, 2004, admitting some errors in its WMD coverage, it appeared on page A10 and Judith Miller’s name was nowhere to be found.”
Miller’s phony “scoops”–which came straight out of the White House and its INC surrogates–ran on the front page, of course.
Read Robert Scheer’s THE EIGHT BIGGEST LIES ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR (published a little over four years ago)to refresh your memory on this. The American people could have thrown these criminals out of office (including the Republicans and Blue Dog (Bush Dog)Democrats, and still can.
“The American people could have thrown these criminals out of office (including the Republicans and Blue Dog (Bush Dog)Democrats, and still can.”
It’s still astonishing to me that this wasn’t done in 2004, in spite of the extraordinary efforts by those in the corporate press to flatten Howard Dean and pimp John Kerry. Obama’s campaign, this year, is sort of a continuation of Dean’s from four years ago, and his chief rival this year is even worse than back then. The press still largely seems to be pulling for Hillary Clinton, but Obama is squashing her like a bug.
I didn’t forget, nor did most of the people who post here. And we aren’t going to forgive either.
And how will the U.S. media cover a possible attack on Iran by the Bush-Cheney administration?
The sudden “retirement” of Navy Adm. Fallon could mean that the Bush-Cheney administration plans to attack Iran.
Fallon was a major obstacle to this course of action. Food for thought in the articles:
“Will Bush, Cheney attack Iran? When and why?”
PopulistAmerica.com
Populist Party of America
Feb. 2, 2007
http://www.populistamerica.com/will_bush_cheney_attack_iran_when_and_why
- - -
“Military Draft Needed for War With Iran and Syria?”
PopulistAmerica.com
Populist Party of America
Sept. 28, 2006
http://www.populistamerica.com/military_draft_needed_for_war_with_iran_and_syria
Our monopoly media system is just a big marketing machine.
Providing accurate information for our democracy is not the goal.
The monopoly media would never risk their ratings and profits to question a President in a time of war.
This is enough reason to impeach our monopoly media by turning it off.
I love seeing the eyeballs and advertising dollars moving to the web where the corporate media no longer has the ability to avoid competition.
In a post-2004-election issue of “Rolling Stone”, Jon Stewart hit the nail on the head when he said that all the media seems to do any more is speculate and that only in the media can you be that wrong that often and have greater job security than you did before. Long live “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”!
What is most alarming about the way the press treated the whole issue about the lies leading to the Iraq War is the uniformity of their response. It indicates that in all the US, only about a dozen did their jobs of even consulting their own files with regard to the claims. Their most recent entries would have included:
On February 24, 2001, Colin Powell, speaking in Cairo said of US policy on Iraq: “We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions [on Iraq] to make sure that they have directed that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”
On May 15, 2001, Colin Powell explained to a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee:
Utah Republican senator Bob Bennett: Mr. Secretary, the UN sanctions on Iraq expire the beginning of June. We’ve had bombs dropped, we’ve had threats made, we’ve had all kinds of activity vis-à-vis Iraq in the previous administration. Now we’re coming to the end. What’s our level of concern about the progress of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons programs?
Colin Powell: The sanctions, as they are called, have succeeded over the last ten years, not in deterring him from moving in that direction, but from actually being able to move in that direction. The Iraqi regime militarily remains fairly weak. It doesn’t have the capacity it had ten or twelve years ago. It has been contained. And even though we have no doubt in our mind that the Iraqi regime is pursuing programs to develop weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological, and nuclear – I think the best intelligence estimates suggest that they have not been terribly successful. There’s no question that they have some stockpiles of some of these sorts of weapons still under their control, but they have not been able to break out, they have not been able to come out with the capacity to deliver these kinds of systems or to actually have these kinds of systems that is much beyond where they were ten years ago.
On July 29, 2001, Condoleezza Rice told the media: “But in terms of Saddam Hussein being there, let’s remember that his country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of the country. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.”
No one even bothered to look when less than one year later, the administration began to claim that Iraq possessed WMD requiring immediate response, despite the inability of Saddam Hussein to even prevent the fly-overs in the north. Voices who were in the right about the war have been demoted: Robert Scheer, William S. Lind, Jonathan Schell, and Scott Ritter, while those who were most spectacularly wrong have been promoted: Tom Friedman, Peter Beinart, Fareed Zakaria, and Jeffrey Goldberg, for instance.
Notice that none of the MSM is carrying the story about the fact that examination of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi government record turned up absolutely NO connection between Saddam’s government and Al-Quaeda.
The story by the McClatchy DC Bureau has not made the MSM press - not even all McClatchy papers including mine have carried this story.
Corporate media will “report” on the next war and the propaganda supporting it just like they “reported” on Iraq, and all the officials who lied us into Iraq will enjoy long and happy careers in the private sector just like all the officials who lied us into Vietnam.
Maybe someone should collect a few names and addresses this time around for survivors of soldiers who died in Iraq for nothing… for sons and daughters, wives and husbands, mothers and fathers… so they could thank Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle in person for sending so many brave soldiers out to die for the political advantage of George W. Bush.
If this generation of liars and butchers were thanked more personally than the previous generation that gave us Vietnam, maybe the next generation would think twice before they play politics with millions of lives.
It’s always a good idea to share the risk among all participants, but for the last 50 years war has been a no-risk proposition for the American ruling class.
It makes my heart hurt…
;(
Cindy
Maybe the journalism schools should be
disbanded. To hire reporters, editors could give the applicants– even history, political science and English majors– a newswriting test and then count the number
of cliches produced, with low scorers to be
hired.
Stephen Colbert’s routine at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is the greatest thing I’ve seen on television in this century. When he sticks it to the morons and suck-ups in the press corps, it’s almost surreal.
If you missed it:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879
The fact that two comedy shows (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) tell us more, much more, about what is truly taking place in this nation and the world should make us all shudder with nausea while we are simultaneously laughing. Over the last generation the MSM’s conversion into The Ministry of Maximum Bullshit, presided over by the likes of Tim Russert and Katie Couric, is just one more sure and certain sign of America’s tailspin into imperial ruin.
Has the fact that litterate people are mostly on the internet taken pressure off Corporate Media, allowing it to move even further right?
Is the internet balancing the impact of the Corporate Media in its effect on elections and the real elections, election coverage?
The second question is easy. No I think its because different internet sites create a scattered message that “prevent the majority from recognizing its own stregnth”
People will go to watter cooler tommorow knowing that everyone saw Spitzer. Same with latest right wing terror scare.
What about the Downing Street memo. There is NO COMMON DENOMINATOR FOR INTERNET. That is a huge reason why its not having an impact on the elections.
This is a serious drawback to the internet that we need to ponder, so please start pondering! Sorry If I sound pondersome, its genetic.
Just saw Bill Moyer’s “Buying the War” program on PBS again.
He presented these failures to several top media brass, and all they could do was shrug and say, “We should have done better”.
Not one of them was willing to say, “Yes, I failed. Excuse me now. I’m going to retire in shame to my country estate.”
The hardcore enablers, Kristol, Krauthamer, Friedman, Miller, O’Reilly et.al. refused to be interviewed.
We have to hammer our local papers every time the print these liars in syndication. This article will provide some handy references.
This is a very important article because the study of history is seldom done with just the intent to find out what might have actually happened long ago.
What the author is really speaking about is the effort to control the present and define the future by obscuring all but those factoids that support the present as the best and only course of action possible.
Instead of a “memory hole” into which all contradictory information is fed to be destroyed forever, we have a whole flock of modern “Winstons” creating a trivia blizard to blind us to the patterns that should be obvious to all.
For an excellent analysis of the US role in the world over the past 60 years go to:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture.html
and watch Harold Pinter’s Nobel lecture from 3 years ago.
I totally agree with RusSCF (4:00 pm) above, who wrote, “Stephen Colbert’s routine at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is the greatest thing I’ve seen on television in this century….”
I’m not sure if RusSCF meant literally just the 21st century, or the whole history of television, but it doesn’t much matter. The performance was extraordinarily brilliant & courageous — a moment of shining Truth in a time of lies. The fact that Colbert could easily see that his audience of White House “journalists” was not amused — that is, that they were uncomfortable & offended, correctly perceiving that he was ridiculing them for being the gutless worms that they are — this makes the performance all the greater.
Wouldn’t it be great if pundit batting averages were calculated? They should also wear the nascar type endorsements like others have suggested for politicians.
Soon after the Iraq war I canceled all my US newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and stopped watching US TV news. I have come to the conclusion that the US MSM is part of the government propaganda organ. I have dumped the US MSM.
Similarly, somewhat later, after analyzing how we came to this disastrous current situation and what the “opposition party” the Dems could or could not have done, I came to a second conclusion: the Dems are 100% complicit in almost everything Bush has done. Therefore I have dumped them too.
Neither of of the two evils (the Reps and the Dems) will get my support.
Real Blame for Iraq Disaster
Blame Bush if you like, but its the moron voters who helped him steal two elections that bear most blame. They have more blood on their hands more than this inept zealot, who abuses are by no means limited to this ill conceived war. Don’t forget the five Supreme court justices who betrayed their oath by placing politics ahead of honor by planting him in office; nor many of our legislators who have betrayed our trust by tolerating these unprecedented abuses.
To ‘Hammo’ I say kinda bush having a link to books you apparently want to sell rather than an email address. Anyway, reinstitution of a draft would bring people back into the streets not seen since the late 60’s
To curmudgeon99, Olbermann covered the issue regarding examination of Iraqi documents albeit in very brief form.
To Nathaniel, I disagree that the internet is having little impact on the election. Obama’s small-donor fund raising, BraveNewFilms, political blogs, live streaming of non-MSM primary coverage with viewer/listener comments, YouTube, and more is changing the election landscape and I think for the better. I’m a boomer and I love what younger folks are doing in this arena. And while one must be very careful to vet news items that appear on the internet I think it is giving voice to views and news with a non-MSM bent.
To Shakker, I had not heard the Nascar sponsor badges idea before. Love it!
And to Citizen1, I quit the NYTimes, stopped watching everything on TV/Cable except Countdown, Democracy Now and some PB stuff. Subscribe to The Nation, listen to Air America and hit the internet hard, daily. Subscribe and contribute to Common Dreams, Media Matters, Democracy Now and various podcasts like Ring of Fire. Being retired I have the time. For those trying to make a living, take care of kids, etc., it is tough and the MSM is mostly responsible for dumbing down the average citizen.
What’s really surprising? All these idiots, liars and lackey’s are still at the very same jobs today, some have even been promoted. There really are two America’s, and the distinction just gets more evident.
I like the remark above on the MSM—we will neither forget nor forgive. Too many people are dead because of these parasite schmucks. And let’s not forget Mr. Potato Head, Tim Russert—who grinned sheepishly when Bill Moyers asked him why he didn’t pick up the phone and check on Dick Cheney’s claim about WMD in which he referenced a NY Times article which he himself had planted there. “I guess I didn’t think to do that,” Russert said. DUH! And as asked above—why do any of these obscene clowns have jobs?
My favorite is the toppling of Saddam’s statue. If you looked in the MSM it appeared to be a grassroot popular movement tearing down the symbol of oppression. The wide photo shows that the whole thing was staged.
http://www.earthisland.org/project/newsPage2.cfm?newsID=397&pageID=177&subSiteID=44
The United States of America is a cruel and violent adolescent. All of our past glories don’t mean squat in the face of what we, as a country do. We have left the bodies of the innocent strewn on many a battlefield and many a neighborhood. We have no adult supervision in the country or the world. We may do as we please all the while worshipping a god who supposedly is non-violent. We eradicate and enslave whole populations due to our wants and needs and make excuses for the crimes and the violence. We marginalize minorities and their plight of pain. We sing ‘God Bless America’ in the hope that we will slay more of the ‘enemy’ than they will of us. America should not be the last beacon of hope but the first. We have failed to live up to our self-bestowed name – that of hope, equality and unlimited opportunity. We have thus far failed our revolutionary fore-fathers and settled into an, I, Me Mine society content to let democracy take care of itself while we, the citizen busy ourselves with trivialities. Democracy will take care of itself by disappearing as will our way of life as disgusting as that may have turned out to be.
Voltaire said it pretty well two hundred and fifty years ago when he proclaimed, “As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.”
Long live the truth for it will always be…
absurdities = geo the inferior
atrocities = Iraq, Afghanistan, NYC, and geo the inferior
The main stream media is:
Lacking any significant clue as to why morality is important.
1) Lame brained, cow eating, skipping fish
2) Celebrity Worshipping
3) Money motivated
4) Money camraderied
5) Raised by failed parents, or raised by child care and nannies or worse raised by TV.
6) Immortality motivated - Google:
“fountain of youth” + regenerative medicine
7) Godless, believing in a man on this planet as God, like Caesar claimed, like the Pharoahs claimed… Like the CIA refers to the top of their power chain…
9) Scared, very scared, which for their position and tact is probably greatly sensible.