'Mission Accomplished': How the Media Covered the Bush Pronouncement 5 Years Ago

[DeepModem Mom]

Editor&Publisher: 'Mission Accomplished': How the Media Covered the Bush Pronouncement 5 Years Ago -- and its Aftermath
By Greg Mitchell
April 30, 2008

NEW YORK On May 1, 2003, Richard Perle advised, in a USA Today Op-Ed, "Relax, Celebrate Victory." The same day, exactly five years ago, President Bush, dressed in a flight suit, landed on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and declared an end to major military operations in Iraq —- with the now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner arrayed behind him in the war’s greatest photo op.

Chris Matthews on MSNBC called Bush a "hero" and boomed, "He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics." He added: "Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple."

PBS' Gwen Ifill said Bush was "part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan." On NBC, Brian Williams gushed, "The pictures were beautiful. It was quite something to see the first-ever American president on a -- on a carrier landing."

When Bush’s jet landed on an aircraft carrier, American casualties stood at 139 killed and 542 wounded.

The following (drawn from my new book on Iraq and the media) looks at how one newspaper -- it happens to be The New York Times -- covered the Bush declaration and its immediate aftermath. One snippet: "The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall, senior allied officials said today."

*

By Elisabeth Bumiller

WASHINGTON, May 1—President Bush’s made-for-television address tonight on the carrier Abraham Lincoln was a powerful, Reaganesque finale to a six-week war. But beneath the golden images of a president steaming home with his troops toward the California coast lay the cold political and military realities that drove Mr. Bush’s advisors to create the moment.

The president declared an end to major combat operations, White House, Pentagon and State Department officials said, for three crucial reasons: to signify the shift of American soldiers from the role of conquerors to police, to open the way for aid from countries that refused to help militarily, and -— above all -— to signal to voters that Mr. Bush is shifting his focus from Baghdad to concerns at home. "This is the formalization that tells everybody we’re not engaged in combat anymore, we’re prepared for getting out," a senior administration official said....

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003797005

[grannylib]

1. "...a hero..." Tweety...even then you must have been smoking crack

to believe anything of the KIND.
The Imperial Imbecile?? A HERO????

Don't make me :puke: