Some people
may have trouble accepting my
assertion that Bill Moyers' upcoming
propaganda piece on the media's activities leading up to the Iraq War is a
bunch of bunk. I understand that the contentions of liberals thrive
best in environments of uncertainty where the facts aren't convenient for
immediate recall, and given that those pre-war days were four long years ago,
maybe Moyers thinks, "Now is the time."
Moyer's
revisionist program asserts the media just didn't do it's job, that it
"enabl[ed] the Bush Administration to go to war," that they just didn't dig deep
enough. They were too busy being "cheerleaders for the war" during the 7-month
long "rush to war."
In fact, the mainstream media were not "cheerleaders for the war" as Moyers
asserts. Far from it, they were busy about the usual appeasement role they have
played for the past 50 years, with the possible exception of the Afghanistan
invasion in the days shortly after 911.
As I considered how I might best illustrate Moyers' revisionism, I recalled
that the Media Research Center's job is monitoring and cataloguing media bias,
so I took a little trip down memory lane as I perused their files.
Examine with me this list of examples of pre-war media coverage from
MRC...and keep in mind that MRC admits they don't catch all the bias that's
going on out there.
These examples start
in March of 2003, right before the invasion was launched, and go all the way
back to August of 2002 when President Bush began to press in earnest for
disarmament verification and compliance from Saddam Hussein.
And these examples are beside the fact that the U.S. had
overwhelming
reason to invade Iraq; these merely examine the facts in light of Moyers' claim of
pre-war media behavior.
Whether you buy any
of the mainstream media spin in these examples or not, I think the case has been
made beyond the point of ridiculousness whether the media was playing
"cheerleader" for the Iraq war.
So, does this look to you like the media was "cheerleading for war" in Iraq?
