http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003785690By Greg Mitchell
April 04, 2008 11:30 AM ET
NEW YORK -- Precisely five years ago the U.S. media were transfixed on the heroic rescue of a captured U.S. Army Pfc. named Jessica Lynch, who supposedly had emerged from her hellhole in Iraq, guns blazing, in a daring operation to save her. The invasion of Iraq had just started to run into some difficulties – amid signs that Americans might not be greeted with flowers after all – and the Lynch rescue helped rally the country and had significant propaganda value.
And propaganda, as it turned out, was at the heart of it.
News would shortly emerge -- after the fall of Baghdad -- that the Lynch rescue was almost nothing like it was pictured in the press, most notably in a Washington Post account which was headlined “She Was Fighting to the Death.” Two months later, on June 17, 2003, the Post ran a 5,000-word front-page piece that partly corrected that original account but also defended much of it. But twelve days after that, Michael Getler, then the paper’s ombudsman, observed: "This was the single most memorable story of the war, and it had huge propaganda value. It was false, but it didn't get knocked down until it didn't matter quite so much."
Two weeks ago, around the 5th anniversary of the war, Lynch told U.S. News and World Report: "I'm still confused as to why they chose to lie and try to make me a legend…They wanted to make people think that maybe this war was a good thing," she said. "Instead, people were getting killed, and it was going downhill fast. They wanted a hero."
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