Some Media Fessing Up to Screwing Up on Iraq
Finally! Backstabbing Scott McClellan’s new book What Happened has the media looking into their own muck ups prior to the invasion of Iraq. As many remember, the media’s coverage was basically a flag waving parade as they helped enable the Bush administration to spew their propaganda without serious question.
From a business perspective, it made total sense for the media to do what they did. After President Bush put weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein in the same sentence, some 80% of Americans supported a toppling of the regime. So the media was simply reporting on what the general public wanted to hear, not doing so could have resulted in a serious drop in ratings and loss of revenue.
In recent days, CNN’s Jessica Yellin has said that former executives helped frame her reports on Iraq to depict the president in a more positive light. Also, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews discussed the way the media was manipulated by the administration to misconstrue information pertaining to Iraq.
It’s high time the media started investigating and reporting on themselves and their accountability for the War in Iraq. Being in the vast minority of those who opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, I was appalled by the main stream media’s horrendous coverage leading up to the invasion.
photo credit: flickr creative commons
3 Comments
So what you are saying is that the news media were fed their stories by the government and failed to think for themselves. This is appalling and why we should all take a moment to think things through before we blindly accept everything that we hear and read.
Mainstream media is all about money and sensationalism and I really don’t watch it much as a result.
Thanks for the post.
Thanks Shane!
Yeah, it was all about the ratings combined with political pressure, it would have been commercial suicide for the networks to accurately report on Iraq pre-invasion. Like how reliable the sources were (they weren’t), how much in our interests it was to invade and how much of a struggle and how much money could it cost the United States?
Then of course, the war and president became unpopular so now the media criticizes everything, CNN’s “Broken Government” and what not. Little bit too late there!
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