In March, on the five-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the nation’s major news outlets reflected on the war and what led us to the half-decade mark. But few evaluated their own roles in the disaster that has maimed countless Iraqis and U.S. troops, killed hundreds of thousands and, according to economists Linda Blimes and Joesph Stiglitz, could ultimately cost up to $3 trillion.
Fortunately, two new books do examine the media’s role. Greg Mitchell’s So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits — and the President — Failed on Iraq (Union Square, March 2008) lays out a timeline of the media’s damning missteps, while When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (University of Chicago, May 2007), co-authored by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence and Steven Livingston, shows how these missteps are not aberrations, but byproducts of the American press.
In So Wrong, Mitchell, the editor at Editor & Publisher, collects and updates 79 of his columns from January 2003 to November 2007. The result: a history of the war as told through the mainstream media prism. Readers are painfully reminded of all the “turning points” cited by war proponents and their counterparts in the press — from “Mission Accomplished” to Gen. David Petraeus’ troop surge.
Mitchell offers gut-wrenching stories about the war that many Americans likely didn’t read about, much less see on television, such as the story of 27-year-old Army Spc. Alyssa Peterson, who shot herself with her service rifle after objecting to Army interrogation techniques in a prison in Tal Afar, in northwestern Iraq.
His columns on soldier suicides and on “solatia” — the U.S. military’s practice of financially compensating Iraqis for physical damage or a loss of life — are haunting, leaving us to wonder why the general public didn’t see more work of this caliber.
But while So Wrong describes the who, what and where of the media’s Iraq meltdown, it doesn’t offer much insight into the why. Aside from Mitchell’s powerful introduction, which argues the press didn’t approach the Bush administration’s claims with enough skepticism, he doesn’t elaborate on the structural reasons the media fell down on the job.
That’s where When the Press Fails is useful. The book, though written in an academic tone, offers a blistering critique of the “operating practices of American journalism,” which the authors say “have grown entwined with power and officials.”
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3619/collapse_of_the_fourth_estate/
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