Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush [View All]

[Rose Siding]

There are extensive excerpts at the link. (It's worth clicking through the ad)

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/05/04/lapdogs/print.html
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Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, looking back on the press's failings with regards to Iraq, suggested, "The media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn't create a debate on our own."

Little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats? In a sense, Ignatius was right and for Post readers that statement may have had a ring of truth to it simply because the Post seemed to do such a masterful job of ignoring prewar criticism from prominent Democrats, like party stalwart Senator Ted Kennedy. In September 2002 he made a passionate, provocative, and newsworthy speech raising all sorts of doubts about the war. It garnered exactly one sentence -- thirty-six words total -- of coverage from the Post, which in 2002 printed more than a thousand articles and columns, totaling perhaps 1 million words about Iraq, but only set aside thirty-six words for Kennedy's antiwar cry. As for Ignatius's suggestions that journalists were supposed to wait to be signaled by the political parties before leaping into action -- that reporters and pundits couldn't raise doubts about the war because Democrats, supposedly, were not -- that represented an entirely new standard for news gathering. Or did Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wait for Democrats to raise doubts about Watergate before the duo started making calls?
...
Independence did not seem to be a trait held in particularly high regard by the MSM at the time. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, CNN's then-news chief Eason Jordan took the extraordinary step of making sure he received a personal okay from Pentagon officials regarding the retired military officers CNN planned to use as on-air commentators for its war coverage. As Jordan explained it, "I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, 'Here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war.' And we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important."

MSNBC was so nervous about employing an on-air liberal host opposing Bush's ordered invasion that it fired Phil Donahue preemptively in 2003, after an internal memo pointed out the legendary talk show host presented "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." MSNBC executives would not confirm -- nor deny -- the existence of the report, which stressed the corporate discomfort Donahue's show might present if it opposed the war while "at the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." By canning Donahue, MSNBC made sure that cable viewers had no place to turn for a nightly opinion program whose host forcefully questioned the invasion. The irony was that at the time of Donahue's firing one month before bombs started falling on Baghdad, MSNBC officials cited the host's weak ratings as the reason for the change. In truth, Donahue was beating out Chris Matthews as MSNBC's highest-rated host.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/05/04/lapdogs/print.html