Over on Salon, where you have to watch a lot of ads if you're not a subscriber, there's an except from Lapdogs, which is a new book by one of my favorite political writers, Eric Boehlert. His thesis, with which I agree, is that the press in this country was so afraid of being accused of being anti-American or pro-terrorist that they misreported the Iraq War (and certain other matters), bending over every which way to not challenge the Bush administration. Here's one paragraph from the article…
It's not fair to suggest the MSM [Main Stream Media] alone convinced Americans to send some sons and daughter to fight. But the press went out of its way to tell a pleasing, administration-friendly tale about the pending war. In truth, Bush never could have ordered the invasion of Iraq — never could have sold the idea at home — if it weren't for the help he received from the MSM, and particularly the stamp of approval he received from so-called liberal media institutions such as the Washington Post, which in February of 2003 alone, editorialized in favor of war nine times. (Between September 2002 and February 2003, the paper editorialized twenty-six times in favor of the war.) The Post had plenty of company from the liberal East Coast media cabal, with high-profile columnists and editors — the newfound liberal hawks — at the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, the New Republic and elsewhere all signing on for a war of preemption. By the time the invasion began, the de facto position among the Beltway chattering class was clearly one that backed Bush and favored war. Years later the New York Times Magazine wrote that most "journalists in Washington found it almost inconceivable, even during the period before a fiercely contested midterm election [in 2002], that the intelligence used to justify the war might simply be invented." Hollywood peace activists could conceive it, but serious Beltway journalists could not? That's hard to believe. More likely journalists could conceive it but, understanding the MSM unspoken guidelines — both social and political — were too timid to express it at the time of war.
If you want to believe that coverage unfavorable to Bush's worldview is bias or that reporters sit around all day figuring how to subvert him, don't bother reading the piece. Some right-wingers will never turn loose of that way of denying bad news, just as some left-wingers will forever cling to the conspiracy theories they use to insulate themselves from reality. But if you're open to the idea that Bush's plunge in popularity is at least in part due to us now knowing things we should have known years ago, you might want to sit through the ads or, better still, buy a Salon subscription.