What is happening in Iraq is a failure by the media to give the American people relevant information. This has probably colored public opinion on the liberation of Iraq. The media’s failure has come in two areas. First, it has failed to provide the news in context, often focusing on negatives. Second, it has not brought evidence to the American people that would place the initial decision to go in into context. Both of these failures have occurred often enough that one cannot be blamed for wondering if a pattern of deception, by omission, is not occurring.
Funny how that works.
In a related article, Robert Kagan notes how the "lie" theme that Strategypage also touches on when it discusses the initial decision to invade Iraq has been fanned by the media even though that charge is indeed a lie--as those who level the charge should know, since they once held those charges to be true:
I recall support for removing Saddam Hussein by force being pretty widespread from the late 1990s through the spring of 2003, among Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, as well as neoconservatives. We all had the same information, and we got it from the same sources. I certainly had never based my judgment on American intelligence, faulty or otherwise, much less on the intelligence produced by the Bush administration before the war. I don't think anyone else did either. I had formed my impressions during the 1990s entirely on the basis of what I regarded as two fairly reliable sources: the U.N. weapons inspectors, led first by Rolf Ekeus and then by Richard Butler; and senior Clinton administration officials, especially President Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen and Al Gore.
No need for the media to point out all this to the public. Funny how this journalism thing works. The press would have no need to manufacture any documents to have good stories about what Democrats and the UN said about Saddam back when Saddam was bad.
Good thing they have schools to teach them how to do this journalism thing. God knows what they'd pump out if they weren't properly vetted and trained.
