The Media slinks back to its corner....

[kentuck]

After all, during the Shock and Awe campaign of George W Bush and before, there were no bigger cheerleaders for the war in Iraq than the American "media". From personalizing the war by posting photos on their studio walls to 24/7 coverage by their armchair and retired generals, fawning over all the new weaponry in our arsenal.

Then they got their great adventure by being "embedded" with the troops. Some of them died "heroically" in the line of fire and others were seriously injured. That did not dissuade them from manipulating the props for George W Bush, from his little flight to Baghdad in the middle of the night to his photo-op on board the USS Lincoln. They did all they could do to help Dubya in his "war" effort.

Now that the deterioration has reached the point where it can no longer be ignored, the "media" finds itself in a self-inflicted predicament. How can they criticize something to which they were so instrumental in bringing about? How can they report responsibly about the present status of our troops in Iraq when they are as responsible, or moreso, than anyone in the Administration, including George W Bush? How can they ever divorce themselves from their own financial interests and report what is in the interest of the American people?

[Guaranteed]

1. Ahhh well they have plausible deniability.

According to them, they weren't supporting the war...they were just reporting on those who were pushing the war.

Not THEIR fault at all :eyes:

[xchrom]

2. the only two views, at this point,

they want to represent is just enough critisism of the war to appear as though they weren't complete whores and to continually tweek the the publics' view of democratic candidate by asking process questions such as ''mr kerry do you believe your campaign is relevant?''.

[Junkdrawer]

3. Rummy: No disturbing pictures! --- Media: Yes, boss!

I have an awful feeling that the following is occurring: we're losing control. Neighborhood-by-neighborhood, Iraqis are taking their country back. So...we're taking it back from them. The old fashion way. My guess is that what is happening RIGHT NOW would make Mai Lai look like a church picnic.

[KharmaTrain]

6. Not My Lai...More Like Khe Sahn Or Hue or Warsaw Ghetto

My Lai was just the ransacking of a small village (one of many we destroyed).

This is a seige in the most classic of terms. We have a large armed force surrounding a city of several thousand people...ready to go house-to-house if necessary to find the killers of mercenaries. It'll surely be shoot first, question later. And we won't see what really happens as the media's eye will be kept far, far away.

This is now turning into a stand-off of wills between the opressed and the oppressors. Some will pooh-pooh that this is just a fringe or over-blown, but it's our young men and women who are stuck in this mess and paying a horrific price. Those inside Fallujah know what they're fighting for...their homes and lives...our kids only are following orders from those who don't have the balls to send their own kids or ever fought themselves.

I fear we may see another version of Tet...massive uprisings ruthlessly put down. The rest of the Arab world is carefully watching as well. Joe Biden had it right, for once, when he said this uprising could lead to our worst nightmares for the region.

[Junkdrawer]

8. We won't know the truth until the soldiers come back...

and the ones most likely to talk won't be allowed to come back until AFTER the election.

[KharmaTrain]

13. And Then We Won't

I had a Vietnam Vet friend in the 70's. He'd served in the Marines and came back after spending nearly two years in VA mental hospitals. He was a mess...couldn't hold down a job, was repeatedly arrested (usually for DUI) and just didn't give a shit. The reason he would tell anyone who'd listen to him was "I've seen life through the eyes of a Search & Destroy Mission"...

I've seen reports of U.S. late night raids (NWI & Internet TV are wonders) that regularly take place and it just chills me. I feel both ways, as I see the fear for the people whose lives are totally destroyed by these missions (reminds me of the Cossack raids of my grandmother's village on Russia 100 years ago), and our own young men and women; forced into a dangerous situation where they know everyone despises them and they can only internalize their true emotions.

What a horrible place to be. Anyone who hopes for bloodshed here should be immediately airlifted to Fallujah (I'll pay for all the costs), so they can fire the first shot.

[DeepModem Mom]

4. Same as the stolen election --

They reminded us over and over about how lucky we were that the matter was settled with "no tanks in the streets," and have bent over backward ever since to legitimize a fraudulent President, who is ludicrously unqualified for the job.

[kentuck]

5. Absolutely !

Excellent point!

[UnityDem]

17. Bingo DMM...I love

your statement...."ludricrously unqualified for the job".....perfect.

[DeepModem Mom]

18. Thanks, and welcome to DU, UnityDem!

[gandalf]

7. Here is the evidence: Two recent empirical studies

Hi kentuck, I am interested in the failure of the media, too. To furnish you with some evidence that support your hypothesis, I post here the link to two recent studies. A summary of them can be found in a article of The Nation, but I was unable to retrieve it now.

Michael Massing, Now They Tell Us, The New York Review of Books, Volume 51, Number 3

"In recent months, US news organizations have rushed to expose the Bush administration's pre-war failings on Iraq. "Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper," declared a recent headline in The Washington Post. "Pressure Rises for Probe of Prewar-Intelligence," said The Wall Street Journal. "So, What Went Wrong?" asked Time. In The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh described how the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, to sift for data to support the administration's claims about Iraq. And on "Truth, War and Consequences," a Frontline documentary that aired last October, a procession of intelligence analysts testified to the administration's use of what one of them called "faith-based intelligence."

Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you all before the war? Why didn't we learn more about these deceptions and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change—when, in short, it might have made a difference? Some maintain that the many analysts who've spoken out since the end of the war were mute before it. But that's not true. Beginning in the summer of 2002, the "intelligence community" was rent by bitter disputes over how Bush officials were using the data on Iraq. Many journalists knew about this, yet few chose to write about it."

Chris Money, Columbia Journalism Review, Issue March/April 2004

"On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his now infamous presentation to the United Nations concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and its ties to the al Qaeda terrorist network. At the time, many journalists, members of Congress, and key Security Council nations remained unconvinced of the necessity of invading Iraq. Laced with declassified satellite imagery, communications intercepts, and information gleaned from Iraqi defectors, Powell’s speech sought to bolster the Bush administration’s case for war by demonstrating an “accumulation of facts and disturbing patterns of behavior” on Iraq’s part. And it enjoyed a strikingly warm reception from one key U.S. audience: the editorial page writers of major newspapers.

“Irrefutable,” declared The Washington Post. Powell “may not have produced a ‘smoking gun,’” added The New York Times, but his speech left “little question that Mr. Hussein had tried hard to conceal one.” Similar assessments came from four other editorial pages that cjr chose to examine — the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. Many foreign papers viewed Powell’s presentation more skeptically, but the endorsements from these six leading domestic editorial boards — four of which would ultimately support the war — strengthened Bush’s hand considerably. “If and when the administration gets editorial support from the elite media, it’s just about a done deal, because the public will fall in line,” says David Domke, a professor of communication at the University of Washington in Seattle who has studied editorial page response to 9/11 and the Iraq war.”

[kentuck]

9. Too bad Clarke couldn't apologize for the media also....

But we will never hear that the media "failed" us also...

[DeepModem Mom]

10. Wasn't there an article posted recently about an apology...

from someone in the media about war coverage?

[gandalf]

11. Amanpour of CNN: CNN practiced self-censorship

http://www.usatoday.com/life/columnist/mediamix/2003-09-14-media-mix_x.htm

CNN's top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, says that the press muzzled itself during the Iraq war. And, she says CNN "was intimidated" by the Bush administration and Fox News, which "put a climate of fear and self-censorship."

As criticism of the war and its aftermath intensifies, Amanpour joins a chorus of journalists and pundits who charge that the media largely toed the Bush administrationline in covering the war and, by doing so, failed to aggressively question the motives behind the invasion.

Said Amanpour: "I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did."

[kentuck]

14. Individual reporters may come clean but their networks ....

...will never come clean....If there are any networks that were more responsible for the jingoism than CNN, they may be hard to find. However, we know how gung ho FOX-TV was about the war and continue to find no fault even today. MSNBC was making its mark with its cheerleading of the war. The Big Three, CBS, NBC, ABC only followed the drumbeats set by the cable networks and their audiences...and advertisers. It has been a major failure of the media all around, in my opinion.

[gandalf]

15. Coming clean: I don't accept their apologies,

and I don't believe them. Naturally journalists know that they cannot believe everything the WH presents to them, especially in war times. If they do, however, they don't adhere to the very basic standards of their profession.

Take the NYT: Their war support was probably not so obvious, compared to Fox, but much more subtle, so that they could probably influence a lot of the more intelligent people, whereas FOX and CNN catered the dumb masses. But I see the danger that the "subtle" war support of the NYT convinced opinion leaders of the war.

[kentuck]

16. Interesting point, gandalf...

It does seem that different parts of the media cater to different parts of the masses, some more "subtle" than others.

[gandalf]

12. And: Dan Rather said something similar after 9/11

Funny (or rather sad) that they always get curious after the fact... do they really?

[NewJeffCT]

19. yes, there was

But, it was some journalist from a mid-sized city... nobody major from one of the networks or national newspapers.

[KoKo]

20. The"Hard" Crack Down started two weeks ago. With last week being

one of the worst I've seen for even my slight checks of CNN, MSNBC/CNBC.

The "Yawning Boy" and "Clark has "personal problems" are two of the biggest examples but even my view of Imus (in desperation I started to try to catch his a.m. show to see if he had been clamped down on)shows that he's been told to "back off." The Stern crackdown, now some flap with Daily Kos (I still don't quite understand the whole KOS thing).

I didn't think the "Media Whores" could get any worse, but I was wrong.

Your observation is interesting, Kentuck. Is it because they were cheerleaders and got caught with their skirts down, or is it because the Corporate Whores that run them are all "Bush Pioneers" and have given their bucks to keep this war going for ratings and profit from contracts over there? World Media Domination. After all, they made sure to close down that dissenting newspaper in Iraq. That was a declaration that "free press" is NOT in their plan to "Restore Democracy." These folks would have shot the radical Patriots at the "Boston Tea Party" and hung Tom Paine from a tree for speaking out against England.

[kentuck]

21. The newspaper shut down in Baghdad was supportive of al Sadr....

Just like America, there is no room for opposing viewpoints. In large part, the shutdown of the newspaper was the reason so many people hit the streets and the resulting violence...

[mmonk]

22. In the interest of the American people?

Novel idea. Sounds something like "by the people, for the people".

[kentuck]

23. That is a novel idea!

and they might want to add, "of the people"...