A year into what has become an increasingly grim occupation, a chorus of senior journalists are now saying what American Free Press has said all along: the mainstream media \u201cfailed the American public\u201d with its uncritical acceptance of the administration\u2019s dubious claims about the need to invade Iraq. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis has been the most shameful era of American media. The media has been sucker-punched completely by this administration,\u201d Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times said recently about how the mainstream media had covered the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. <\/p>\n
Sheer, a visiting professor at University of California at Berkeley\u2019s Graduate School of Journalism, made his comments on March 18 during a conference about the media\u2019s role in the war in Iraq. <\/p>\n
Berkeley\u2019s highly regarded school of journalism co-sponsored the three-day Media at War conference, which was open to the public. The conference brought together dozens of international correspondents, journalists, editors and directors of mainstream media outlets. <\/p>\n
Key personalities in the run-up to the war, such as Hans Blix, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector, and Joseph C. Wilson, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, also participated in the March 16-18 conference. <\/p>\n
Webcasts from the conference are viewable online at the website of Berkeley\u2019s school of journalism. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Speaking for the military, Lt. Col. Richard Long, former Public Information Director for the U.S. Marine Corps, spoke about why the military had decided to embed journalists with military units in the field. \u201cFrankly, our job is to win the war,\u201d Long said. \u201cPart of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment.\u201d <\/p>\n Long, as head of media relations for the Marine Corps, managed the media boot camp in Quantico, Virginia, where more than 700 journalists were prepared for their war assignments. \u201cOverall,\u201d Long said, \u201cwe were very happy with the outcome.\u201d <\/p>\n Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, said, \u201cEmbeddedness has a built-in swerve toward propaganda\u2026because an embedded reporter is on a team.\u201d Because his life depends on the soldiers with whom he is embedded, Gitlin said the journalist\u2019s desire to write negative stories is \u201cquite diminished.\u201d <\/p>\n While American Free Press has often been criticized for being critical of the Bush administration\u2019s plan to go to war in Iraq, a senior journalist with The New York Times told the conference that his paper had \u201cfailed the American public by being insufficiently critical.\u201d <\/p>\n Calling in to the conference from Baghdad, where images and reports of the increasingly grim occupation are censored before being be presented to American readers, John Burns, The New York Times bureau chief said: \u201cWe failed the American public by being insufficiently critical about elements of the administration\u2019s plan to go to war.\u201d <\/p>\n Maher Abdallah Ahmad of the Arab television network Al Jazeera said, \u201cThe Americans still do not know what is happening in Iraq.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cDoes anyone here know how many Iraqis were killed in the war?\u201d Ahmad asked. \u201cYou make all these efforts to establish a democracy, and you don\u2019t give a damn how many people were killed?\u201d <\/p>\n Federico Rampini, U.S. correspondent for Italy\u2019s La Republica newspaper said he was amazed that American journalists have not investigated more deeply Vice President Dick Cheney\u2019s role in the Halliburton scandal. In Italy, Rampini said, such a story \u201cwould have been on the front page for months.\u201d<\/p>\n While the leading U.S. news organizations are now rushing to expose the Bush administration\u2019s pre-war deceptions on the need to invade Iraq, Michael <\/p>\n Massing, in his article \u201cNow They Tell Us\u201d in The New York Review of Books, wrote: \u201cWhere were you all before the war? Why didn\u2019t we learn more about these deceptions and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change \u2013 when, in short, it might have made a difference?\u201d <\/p>\n Massing points out that Judith Miller of the Times wrote several front-page articles before the war about Iraq\u2019s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) based on faulty information provided by Iraqi defectors of dubious credibility. In an e-mail to Burns, Miller wrote that Ahmed Chalabi, the indicted bank embezzler and head of the exile Iraqi National Congress, \u201chas provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cNot until September 29, 2003,\u201d Massing wrote, \u201cdid The New York Times get around to informing readers about the controversy over Chalabi and the defectors associated with him.\u201d More than 6 months into the war and with no evidence of the alleged Iraqi WMD anywhere to be found, Douglas Jehl reported that most of the information provided by Chalabi and his defectors had been judged by the Defense Intelligence Agency as being \u201cof little or no value.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThe press was in a good position to educate the public on the administration\u2019s justifications for war,\u201d Massing wrote, \u201cYet for the most part, it never did so. <\/p>\n \u201cThe performance of the Times was especially deficient,\u201d Massing wrote. \u201cCompared to other major papers, the Times placed more credence in defectors, expressed less confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters.\u201d <\/p>\n When Massing asked Miller why she had not included more comments in her stories from experts who contested the assertions made by Iraqi defectors and the White House, she said: \u201cMy job isn\u2019t to assess the government\u2019s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq\u2019s arsenal.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cBut even a cub reporter should know that if the government tells her the sky is blue, it\u2019s her job to check whether it might not be red or gray or black,\u201d Rich Mercier of The Free Lance\u2013Star of Fredericksburg, Va. wrote on March 28. \u201cAnd skepticism must be exercised most strongly when the matter at hand is whether the nation will go to war. <\/p>\n \u201cBy neglecting to fully employ their critical-thinking faculties, Miller and many of her colleagues in the elite print media not only failed their readers during the countdown to the Iraq invasion, they failed our democracy,\u201d Mercier wrote, \u201cAnd there\u2019s no excusing that failure.\u201d <\/p>\n As a leading opinion-setting newspaper, the Times set a pro-war tone on Iraq that many other papers followed. Massing concluded that the \u201cpack mentality\u201d is \u201cone of the most entrenched and disturbing features of American journalism.\u201d <\/p>\n Finis <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The mainstream US media has finally admitted what many have long thought<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-The_Media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1765\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}