I Cogitate

Back in the Days of 'Mission Accomplished': How One Paper Covered Bush Declaration Four Years Ago
Greg Mitchell
Editor & Publisher
May 1, 2007 

NEW YORK - Today marks the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s jet landing on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and his speech declaring major fighting in Iraq over, all in front of a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner.

At the time, it was heralded by much of the mainstream media as a fitting moment of triumph. "He won the war," boomed MSNBC's Chris Matthews. "He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics."

Since then, it has become -- during four more years of death and war -- a symbol of American hubris and setbacks in Iraq. Today it is often lampooned as a tragic “photo op.” Rock singer Neil Young, in a song referencing the event, sings, "History is a cruel judge of overconfidence."

When Bush spoke, the U.S. had 150,000 troops in Iraq; the number now stands at 160,000 or more. American casualties at the time were 139 killed and 542 wounded. A year ago they stood at 2,400 killed and now it's 3,350 dead.

With that in mind, here are excerpts revealing how one newspaper, The New York Times, covered the event and aftermath four years ago. They include this nugget: "The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall, senior allied officials said today."

By Elisabeth Bumiller

WASHINGTON, May 1 -- President Bush's made-for-television address tonight on the carrier Abraham Lincoln was a powerful, Reaganesque finale to a six-week war. But beneath the golden images of a president steaming home with his troops toward the California coast lay the cold political and military realities that drove Mr. Bush's advisers to create the moment.

The president declared an end to major combat operations, White House, Pentagon and State Department officials said, for three crucial reasons: to signify the shift of American soldiers from the role of conquerors to police, to open the way for aid from countries that refused to help militarily and -- above all -- to signal to voters that Mr. Bush is shifting his focus from Baghdad to concerns at home&hellip.

''This is the formalization that tells everybody we're not engaged in combat anymore, we're prepared for getting out,'' a senior administration official said.

From published transcript of President Bush's speech on aircraft carrier, May 1:

"The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding.

"And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because that regime is no more.

"In these 19 months that changed the world, our actions have been focused, and deliberate, and proportionate to the offense. We have not forgotten the victims of September 11th -- the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got."

A Media Role in Selling the War? No Question.
Tom Shales
Washington Post
April 25, 2007

Perhaps the truth shall eventually set you free, but first it might make you very, very depressed. Tonight's edition of "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS is one of the most gripping and important pieces of broadcast journalism so far this year, but it's as disheartening as it is compelling.

It's always depressing to learn that you've been had, but incalculably more so when the deception has resulted in thousands of Americans dying in the Iraq war effort.

In this 90-minute report, called "Buying the War," Moyers and producer Kathleen Hughes use alarming evidence and an array of respected journalists to make the case that, in the rage that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the media abandoned their role as watchdog and became a lapdog instead.

Exhibit A -- the first event recalled in this report -- is a news conference by President Bush on March 6, 2003, which Moyers says is two weeks before Bush "will order America to war." The press conference was a sham, with Bush calling only on "friendly" reporters who'd ask friendly questions. The corker was this scorching investigative query: "Mr. President, how is your faith guiding you?"

"At least a dozen times during this press conference," Moyers says, Bush would "invoke 9/11 and al-Qaeda to justify a preemptive attack on a country that has not attacked America." The link between al-Qaeda and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was never proved and had to be taken on faith, Moyers recalls, as did the administration claim that Hussein had developed, was developing, or might soon develop weapons of mass destruction.

Moyers does not set out to attack anyone himself; instead he tries to find out why journalists -- electronic and print -- behaved in ways that are supposed to be anathema to a free press in a free nation. The show asks: Did the Bush administration benefit from having an effective collection of accomplished dupers -- a contingent that Washington Post investigative reporter Walter Pincus calls "the marketing group" -- or did the outrage of 9/11 made the press more vulnerable to being duped?

'Devastating' Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming
Greg Mitchell
Editor & Publisher
April 19, 2007

NEW YORK (Commentary) -  The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called "Buying the War," which marks the return of "Bill Moyers Journal." E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week.

While much of the evidence of the media's role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.

The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again -- yet Moyers points out, "the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses."

Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, "The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should've all been doing that."

At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.

Poynteronline
April 9, 2007

How a Small Newspaper Won a Big Award

In this Q&A, Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette's Ken Ward Jr. shares what it took to produce his award-winning series on mine safety.

By Leann Frola
Naughton Fellow
Contributors: Ken Ward Jr.

Last January, the media world focused its attention on 13 miners trapped in a West Virginia coal mine named Sago. The news broke the same day a woman in Kentucky was preparing to bury her husband. That man, a coal miner named Bud Morris, had bled to death three days earlier after a coal car slammed into him.

The national media never showed up on his wife's door step. But Morris represents the majority of miners in America who are killed on the job: They die alone. And when no one seemed to notice this pattern, along with the alarming number of deaths 2006 brought, a reporter from a small newspaper in West Virginia did...

At national reporting conferences, I hear a lot of whining from reporters that is really unjustified. I think we as reporters really censor ourselves more than editors or publishers. I think that reporters make their own decisions sometimes, and I think they're often poor decisions about what stories they're going to pursue -- spending too much time on little daily stories that don't really mean that much or move an issue forward.

Reporters need to take ownership themselves on how they should cover their beat. Editors and publishers want to fill the paper with what people want to read, and good investigative stories are what people want to read.

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