http://screechingkettle.blogspot.com/2013/02/how-msnbc-helped-sell-iraq-war.html
While searching the news headlines today, I noticed an article on MSNBC's website titled, "How the Bush administration sold the Iraq War", which goes on to quote and criticize various lies from Bush officials regarding Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction program.
What's interesting here is not the criticism of Bush officials (which is appropriate), but that the article, perhaps unsurprisingly, never once mentions the news networks which helped the Bush administration sell the war to the public. Maybe that's because one of those networks was MSNBC:
* "MSNBC cancels Donahue, its top-rated show and a rare oasis of war skepticism in the mainstream media. An internal NBC report surfaces that describes him as "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." The report worries that his show could become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.""
* "MSNBC's Hardball host Chris Matthews asks of World Bank/IMF protests in Washington DC: "Those people out in the streets, do they hate America?"
Conservative pundit Cliff May responds: "Yes, I'm afraid a lot of them do. They hate America. They align themselves with Saddam Hussein. They align themselves with terrorists all over the world." Hardball correspondent David Shuster later adds that "anti-Americanism is in the air.""
* "MSNBC's Dan Abrams indignantly defends the Bush administration against critics who suggest the White House isn't telling the truth about the rationale for war:
"Well anyone making these allegations better be willing to defend exactly what they're saying. They're saying this administration is at the least morally corrupt, lying to the American public and the world about their motives and willing to have Americans die for that lie, and at worst, that they're actually abhorrent criminals. That's absurd.""
* "MSNBC's Chris Matthews goes further: "We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. 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. We're not like the Brits.""
Although MSNBC was only one of the big three "news" networks involved with selling the war to the public (FOX and CNN being the other two), it's nonetheless quite remarkable that this organization has the audacity to blame anyone else for its own raging nationalist fervor and unrepentant journalistic failures during the the leadup to the needless and bloody Iraq War.
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