Like Who Cares?

by tristero

This post grossly distorts what was going on in the media “on the eve of war.” Greg Mitchell is correct that the NY Times, for example, editorialized against the war. But it was carefully timed to be too late to have any effect.

Besides, who cares what newspapers’ editorial boards think anymore? The action’s on this new fangled contraption called “Television.” Now, on “Television” – sometimes abbreviated “TV” and pronounced “Tee Vee” – the networks made numerous timpanists and double-bassists extremely wealthy by commissioning ominous music for their On The Brink of War specials. Journalists who should have known better were signing up for embedding with an enthusiasm that was, to be extraordinarily polite about it, unseemly given the blatant way Rumsfeld et al were crowing about this plan to co-opt press coverage.

Greg Mitchell is right: media coverage of efforts to start this insane war was complex. Doctoral theses will be written about nuances like the editorial opposition to the war. But there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind five years later that both the coverage and the attitude of the press towards the Bush administration in 2002/03 was disgracefully craven. To focus on a minor detail while making only a half-hearted attempt to put it into the entire context of the media blitz reads like a move to let the press off the hook. After once again seeing the pictures that emerged from Abu Ghraib of an American soldier giving the thumbs up over the corpse of a murdered prisoner, I’m not inclined to be so generous.

Remember: this was a time when no one who cared about his or her career would dare speak out against the war and when some very astute observers were bamboozled. In the blogosphere, Josh Marshall, Matthew Yglesias, and Kevin Drum were among them Public opposition to the war was lukewarm at best among anyone who had access to the mainstream press. Including the editorialists.