For the Press, No Iraq Introspection
 
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 21:54:20 -0500 (CDT)


http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2008/03/press-and-iraq-five-years-later.html

For the Press, No Iraq Introspection
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On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, the media reexamined just about
everythingexcept for themselves. "
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Greg Mitchell
March 28

In the thousands of articles and television reports marking the fifth
anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, nearly every important aspect of the
war was probed. Fingers were pointed at the usual suspectsRumsfeld,
Bremer, and Cheney; stubborn Republicans and weak-willed Democrats, among
many othersbut conspicuously absent from the media coverage was any
soul-searching on behalf of the press, as if there had been no major media
slips or tragic omissions over the past five years. With months to plan
for the commemoration, the media were ready to take stock of
everythingbut themselves.

By and large, when the press did revisit their Iraq coverage, they
showcased some of the undeniably terrific reporting, photography, and
videography that have emerged from the war zone. But a frank assessment of
the overall media performance, from the "run-up" to the "surge," was
virtually nonexistent. Thats not only shameful and revealing, its also a
real missed opportunity, since there is so much to be learned from the
media's Iraq coveragethe good, the bad, and the uglyby future
generations of journalists, not to mention the current one.

Yes, the fateful media mistakes and misreporting of Iraqi WMD before the
war have been widely covered in the past, but how could this not be widely
revisited at the fifth-year mark, with 4,000 American soldiers dead and
thousands wounded for life? What about the medias role in falling victim
to official propaganda in the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman cases? The
delay in exposing the abuses at Abu Ghraib and attacks on civilians in
Haditha and numerous other places?

The list goes on: Why did it take years to really focus on ill treatment
of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans back here at home? To expose the rising
suicide rate among soldiers and vets? To assess the full financial costs
of the war? Why did the media go along with the Pentagons ban on showing
coffins returning from Iraq, and the restrictions on running pictures of
dead or injured American soldiersthus preventing the public from
absorbing the true costs of the war? On reflection, what were the
strengths and weaknesses of the much-ballyhooed "embedded" journalists
plan?

What about the reluctance of editorial pages and pundits to propose, even
tentatively, a real change in course in Iraq, as month after month, and
then year after year, passed? Almost four years went by before a major
newspaper called for the beginning of even a very slow, phased withdrawal.
What do they think of that delaynow?

And in recent months, why are there so few reporters covering the war now?
Are budgetary excusesand blaming readers for not being much interested
anymorereally valid? Do readers take their cues from the (increasingly
disinterested) media?

There has been a tremendous amount of truly heroic journalism from the war
zone and tough-minded reporting into the war causes and conduct here at
home, and that certainly deserves to be celebrated. But the medias
current failure to reexamine themselves only adds to the black mark
journalists have received for past oversights and errors in their
chronicling of this war.

Photo of reporters interviewing military personnel by flickr user
jamesdale10 used under a Creative Commons license.

Greg Mitchell is editor of Editor & Publisher and the author of So Wrong
for So Long: How the Press, the Punditsand the PresidentFailed on Iraq
(Union Square Press), which was published in March.