News Media Mostly Ignoring Iraq War Critics
When it comes to Iraq, the media only seems to be giving Americans one side of the story.
Yesterday, James Joyner linked to his piece at The National Interest regarding the arguments that some have made that we should not be listening to people such as Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney given the fact that they got the Iraq War so spectacularly wrong a decade ago. As I noted in my own comment to the post, I think James raises good points and that the failure, if there is one, isn’t in the fact that these former Bush Administration are talking about what to do in Iraq today but in the failure of hosts of the Sunday morning and other news talk shows where they’ve appeared to challenge them more directly on the role their decisions have played in the present situation. On the other side of the coin, though, Sam Stein and Michael Calderone raise a very good point at The Huffington Post when they ask why there aren’t more people who were critical of the decision to go to war originally being asked to talk about what’s going on in Iraq today:
Kent Conrad’s phone hasn’t been ringing very much over the past few weeks, as Iraq, and the debate over America’s future in the country, has once again dominated the news.
The architects of the Iraq war are back in TV studios and on op-ed pages, as are journalists and pundits who promoted the Bush administration’s ultimately bogus case for invading. But Conrad, a former senator who was one of only 23 to vote against authorizing the war in October 2002, hasn’t heard from CNN, MSNBC or any other TV outlet. “Not once,” he said, when asked if anyone in the press had reached out regarding the current crisis in Iraq.
In an email to The Huffington Post, Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, offered two possible explanations. The first, he said, is “simply the incompetence of the media.” The second is “the shrillness of those trying desperately to rewrite history to cover their own devastating failures.”
Despite catastrophic misjudgments — that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that U.S. forces would be greeted as liberators, that the war would pay for itself with oil revenues — the Iraq war boosters keep getting booked, while those politicians and journalists who were skeptical of the Bush administration’s “slam dunk” case for war remain largely on the sidelines.
McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay, who was part of the Knight Ridder team that produced what is widely regarded as the best pre-war reporting, has only been invited to discuss Iraq’s unraveling on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” a media criticism program. Landay, who just returned from a 10-day reporting trip in neighboring Syria, hasn’t heard from any cable news or Sunday public affairs shows.
Landay views the decision to book former Vice President Dick Cheney and former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz as a cynical attempt at getting “clicks and eyeballs.” Though Cheney and Wolfowitz “got things so disastrously wrong,” he said, the media gives them platforms “to create controversy, and that controversy will be enhanced by whatever they say, irrespective of whether it’s accurate or not.”
According to liberal watchdog Media Matters, Cheney, Wolfowitz, former presidential envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol have made 16 TV appearances in less than two weeks.
“The analogy I’d draw is the following: You go to a doctor, who diagnoses an ailment and prescribes drugs and surgery,” Landay said. “The diagnosis, however, turns out to be disastrously wrong and as a result, the drugs and surgery leave you crippled for years to come. Are you going to go back to that same doctor to diagnose your next illness? No, you aren’t. In fact, you probably sued him/her for malpractice after the first go-round. Unfortunately, we can’t sue Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Feith and the others for malpractice. But we can stop listening to them.”
Landay’s absence from the talking head circuit could be chalked up to the fact that he’s not a lawmaker who has say over how to proceed in the civil war-ravaged region. TV bookers, of course, tend to gravitate toward higher-profile guests. And herein lies another media challenge for the community of Iraq war skeptics. There simply aren’t that many high-profile lawmakers who got the vote right last time around.
Of the 23 senators who voted against the war, only eight remain in Congress. Three passionate critics of the Iraq invasion, Sens. Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd and Paul Wellstone, have died. Another major skeptic, former Sen. Russ Feingold, now serves in the Obama administration as a special envoy to an African region. And former Vice President Al Gore, who, unlike his successor, was right about Iraq, remains focused on climate change and hasn’t spoken out about the current mess.
Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and presumed Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton were all senators in 2002 and all voted for the Iraq resolution. (The latter two have apologized for their votes in recent interviews.)
That leaves a small group of Democratic senators with both the political clout and moral standing to represent the anti-war faction on television, including Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Pat Leahy (D-Vt.). Boxer is the only one who has gone on TV to discuss the current crisis, saying on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday that her 2002 vote against the war was one of her “proudest moments.”
If the pool of current senators who opposed the war in 2002 is too shallow, bookers could look to former ones, like Conrad. But they too are being kept largely out of the discussion. Former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado said that he has not been asked to discuss the current situation on television despite having been against the invasion when “most leading Democratic senators voted aye.”
“Fair and balanced mainstream media,” he said sardonically, when asked why the war boosters were appearing so frequently instead.
The complaint that Stein and Calderone make her goes well beyond Iraq, actually. As I’ve noted before in relation to the Sunday morning programs specifically (see here and here), the major networks all seem to draw from a very tiny pool of potential guests that is made up for the most part of Administration officials, those members of Congress who stick around town on the weekend, and the same group of inside-the-beltway political pundits week after week. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and (when he was still in the Senate) Joe Lieberman have been on these shows so frequently that one has to wonder if they’ve taken up permanent residence in the studios where these shows are shot. The situation is largely the same with the weekday programming on the cable news networks, which generally each have their own rotating set of pundits from which they seldom stray. Indeed, it’s likely that if you watch one of these networks during the course of the day you’ll see most of these people recycle their appearance in the morning, afternoon, and evening and they’ll say the same thing every single time.
As Stein and Calderone note, this seems to be repeating itself when it comes to discussions regarding current events in Iraq. You’re more likely to see people who supported the war a decade ago than you are to see any of the critics. Admittedly, much of that is due to the fact that the people who were on the critical side of the war debate don’t typically get invited on these shows to begin with and the fact that many of them aren’t located in the New York or D.C. areas to begin with. Like James, I am not going to argue that the people who supported the war ten years ago should be ignored or silenced, although I do think that they should be confronted about the consequences of their decisions as I noted above. In the end, the marketplace of ideas is not served by excluding people from it, and that’s the main motivations for my zealous defense of the First Amendment. The problem isn’t that Paul Wolfowitz is getting air time, the problem is that the people who have a different perspective and might actually be able to educate viewers about the flaws in his position aren’t being that same time. Some may argue that this is part of some conscious choice on the part of the media, but I tend to think its more abject laziness motivated by the factors noted above. Whatever the reason, though, the debate on Iraq over the past few weeks has most assuredly been dominated by the people who were in support of the original invasion, and they are the ones who have been setting the parameters of the debate because of that. The American people are being deprived of alternative points of view to a large degree, and the news media is responsible for it.
Because at the end of the day, it’s all about keeping the endless river of taxpayer dollars flowing into the DOD and the pockets of defense contractors. War cheerleaders aid this process.
The Sunday talkies are depressing.
The guest line-up – the regular rosters – seem to be set and are very predictable. It is far too easy for producers to book Cheney, McCain or any other predictable advocate of War in Iraq, so the show producers just hit the speed dial and book these guys. It’s not as if Cheney in particular, is going to turn down an opportunity to revise history, while at the same time attempt to characterize Barack Obama as Neville Chamberlain.
It really is laziness on the part of the those shows.
There could be a third explanation: Israeli and Jewish influence on U.S. media which may play a small role in shading the stories to favor intervention. But then, thats an anti semitic, racist, canard since we all know there is no such influence so I will apologize to anyone I might have offended.
It really is astonishing that the guys who got it wrong appear time after time and the folks who got it right aren’t even being asked. You do have to wonder if we truly have a free press here.
What’s even more disgraceful is that they are not being asked repeatedly , “How and why did you get it so wrong?”The various hosts seem to go out of their way not to ask them tough questions. Ah well, that’s your librul media at work.
Apart from those mentioned above, here are the folks I want to hear from:
Thomas Ricks
Scott Ritter
Hans Blix
Eric Shinseki
Barbara Lee
James Fallows
Add to the list the many antiwar liberal bloggers who got it right all along.
There are plenty of people to choose from. Maybe we should send Gregory, Stephanopoulos, and Schieffer a list.
I know I have been very disappointed these past few weeks. Here I am, day after day sitting by my phone with bated breath and NO ONE has called me to be on their show. Not one single person, radio or TV. Personally, I think they are just all embarrassed that a no name hillbilly from the Ozarks seems to know more about foreign policy than they ever dreamed of.
To expound on anjin’s point, making defense contractors and oil companies money seems to be the only thing the neocons ever did well. Bush’s institute releasing a book on the economy is laughable as should be anyone willing to listen to tired neocon economic policy which proved disastrous. How about how great deficit spending is until it wasn’t when there was a Dem POTUS? So far the neocon agenda and policies: bankrupted this country, lied us into a costly war of choice which may go down in history the biggest foreign policy mistake, introduced a dangerous neoimperialism through the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, destabilized the Middle East, empowered our enemies in the region, bred new ones, took away America’s moral high ground through the legitimization of torture, rendition and black site prisons, destabilized the world through an abysmal economic collapse, but goddam did their friends and supporters make more money than they can spend in 100 lifetimes. The real question is why does anyone ever invite them to speak on anything? How many times do they need to be proven wrong before they stop saying shit like wealth will trickle down or invading Iraq was the right thing to do?
@the Q: No need to apologize.
I have heard about some of the things that this ISIS group, or whatever they call themselves, is supposedly to have done. I have not heard or been able to find much information about them, let alone in depth studies. It seems that the foreign policy leaders (both parties), do not have a lot of depth and experience. It is too bad that there aren’t any people around from the WW II era. We need someone to get over there and get the various factions together before things get worse .
@the Q: Go pound sand, you anti-Semitic jackhole.
Here’s a theory: extrapolating from the commenters here, perhaps the new media isn’t interested in seeing how many different ways people can say “it’s all Bush’s fault!” instead of offering potential solutions.
Below are some other possible reasons why the media currently largely ignores or marginalizes anti-war viewpoints. Much of this applies to coverage before the Iraq war. By “media” I’m mostly talking about the so-called “mainstream media”:
– Because inviting people with anti-war viewpoints now would call into question the credibility of the media itself, by raising issues like, “Why didn’t you feature these people before we invaded Iraq?”
– Because the media are toadies to power. In part this is because the media rely on those in power for information via “leaks”, so-called “off-the-record” interviews, etc. In part, because many of the people in the news business want to feel important by association.
– Because most anti-war people don’t have much political power, and providing a platform for those who seriously question power may have consequences, such as reduced access to sources, PR issues involving public criticisms about their patriotism, etc.
– Because one of the things that attracts viewers to TV news shows and provides “credibility by association” is being able to feature “big names” (John McCain, General Petraeus before the scandal, etc) and people who have built-in credibility for many people, such as ex-Generals, as opposed to somebody who is an expert that few people have heard of. If you object by saying that the big names don’t have credibility with *you*, consider who the demographic is for mainstream media TV news.
– Because most consumers of the media like nice, simple narratives, preferably ones that confirm their own ideas and biases.
– Because, as the saying goes, “War is a racket”. It raises ratings for the media, may be very profitable for their parent companies, and so on. I’m not making any claims about people in the media deliberately trying to promote war (feel free to do so, yourself), but it can be very hard not to go along with the bleating herd if all the incentives are going in their direction.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Good call. That’s why Dick Cheney is on those shows: to counter balance the very obvious empirically-based observations that the War in Iraq, initiated by the Bush Administration under what turned out to be a false pretext, is the most prominent foreign policy mistake since the War in Vietnam. Dick Cheney needs to be there to revise history and deflect blame from himself and the Bush Administration.
I think the problem is more fundamental. Our media do not like foreign policy skeptics. They don’t like people who say they’re not sure of the answers or that Plan A may not be the best idea. What they like is people making bold declarations, promoting aggressive policy and utterly absolutely sure of themselves. They especially love people who say that unless we act now, we are DOOMED DOOME DOOMED! It’s the same mentality that causes historians to over-rate Presidents who started or got us involved with wars as opposed to Presidents who kept us out of them. There’s something in the chattering class that worships war-mongering and certainty about war-mongering.
@al-Ameda: I’ll take your gesture of amity and return it: it’s certainly arguable just how much blame Obama gets, but it’s not arguable that it’s entirely Obama’s responsibility now. And arguing about the blame is rather pointless, so let’s focus on the responsibility.
This is one of the main issues Obama ran on, that he could handle it better than Bush. So why not leave the blame issue until later, and deal with the crisis right now? Why waste time on finger-pointing and excuse-making, when people — many of them innocents — are getting killed right now?
The sage Saul Alinsky put forth his Rules for Radicals, and #11 is thus: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” The attacks on Bush and his policies were successful; now is the time for a constructive alternative. Well, the time was 2009, but it’s still relevant.
@the Q: Actually, I find your stupidity to be the most offensive of all.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Saul Alinsky? L O L! Why are conservatives obsessed with Saul Alinsky?
One thing I know with certainty: A constructive alternative is not something that Dick Cheney is interested in.
Apart from another empirical fact that interventionists choose to ignore – not all that long ago Maliki made it clear that he did not want America around much longer – how is it that we can materially, short of sending the troops back in and launching air atrikes, effect a dramatically different result? Bush made a huge mistake in 2003 (oops, sorry, hate to bring up reality).
@Jenos Idanian #13:
If you are really concerned about responsibility and constructive solutions going forward why do so many of your posts focus on blame? It seems like you take this position when someone on your side is getting the blame and stop pushing this position when it is someone on the other side getting the blame. One would almost think that it was partisanship rather than a consistent position.
@anjin-san: No.
Its becayse at the end of the day its all about protecting Obama.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
You’re right Obama deserves all of the blame for the Status of Forces Agreement Bush and Cheney signed in 2008 to end the conflict.Let’s BLAME Obama and hold him RESPONSIBLE for the failures of the previous “regime.”
You’re right since Obama ran on the promise that he would not get foreign policy as wrong as the neocons, and couldn’t be more right about it since the neocons have yet to get anything right, lets forsake blame on this entire foreign adventure because now those on the right are so fucking concerned about the Iraqi civilians. Those same civilians that have been getting slaughtered by our troops for ten years now, while we get told by said neocons that those civilian casualty rates are nowhere near accurate.
And again the right is the only reason Alinsky gets brought up.
I’d chalk it up to the nice little incestuous circle jerk all of these clowns have created. The morning talk shows and the neocons have been used to patting each other on the back for years; why should they stop now?
I’d also blame the Washington Post.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
An intriguing notion. Let’s consider it on its merits for a moment.
If this were true, we should be seeing experts who can offer potential solutions, and who have some credibility in that arena. Among those, we should weed out the ones who are primarily interested in finger-pointing instead of talking about the way forward. Is that who we are seeing?
Alas, the current roster of guests fails the first test, laughably. So, it was a good hypothesis, but easily falsified.
@Grewgills: Let me be clear: I don’t blame Obama for any of the scandals that have developed in his administration. Benghazi, the IRS targeting, the VA, Fast & Furious, Iraq — I don’t believe that he was involved in any of those. Cynically put, I don’t think he’s hands-on enough to have been involved in any of them. He’s too big-picture oriented to deal with such details.
But I do hold him responsible for them. He appointed the people who did the wrong things, or didn’t do the right things, or didn’t properly oversee the people who did the wrong things or didn’t do the right things. And part of his job is to fix these things when they happen.
Instead, we see the same old thing, every time. Obama finds out about the problem just like we did, when we did, and is outraged and will not rest until it’s fixed. And then he does nothing, because there’s an investigation going on. And then the Obama loyalists start talking about how it’s all a phony scandal, ginned up for political gain and exploited by his opponents for partisan purposes. And then Obama starts repeating that line, over and over.
Obama ran on the promise of doing better than Bush, fixing the things Bush had screwed up. And he ran for re-election in 2012, saying the same things. I didn’t believe him and didn’t vote for him either time, but I’m still an American citizen and he’s still my president.
Obama actively sought the responsibility to address these situations, and affirmed it by running for re-election. He’s twice taken the oath to uphold that responsibility. He needs to step up and accept it — and do the job he asked us to give him.
It might be that the news networks find war critics uninteresting and boring people and who will not increase their viewership. Let’s think about some reasons for being against the war.
I didn’t believe the WMD intelligence and the other reasons were not worth going to war over.
Even if I believed the WMD intelligence I would not have voted for war, because I am just someone who is against war.
I didn’t believe that Hussein was bad enough that he needed to be removed.
I knew how this war would turn out.
I know that whatever Bush wants, it is best to do the opposite. Basically I hate the man.
This last one probably applies to Al Gore. This is from Party of Defeat by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson, p. 105.
In February 2004, former vice president Al Gore again appeared on a MoveOn.org platform. This time he denounced Bush as a traitor, an accusation the White House had so far refrained from making against ferocious opponents of the war both inside the Democratic Party and beyond it.
“He betrayed us!” Gore screamed at the cameras. It was a strange moment from more than one perspective, since Gore himself advocated regime change in Iraq and the forcible toppling of Saddam Hussein and had characterized Saddam’s regime as “evil”. But he was now equating such sentiments and actions with high political crimes. Gore claimed that the war had been “preordained and planned before 9-11” and decried Bush as the man responsible, although his own administration had called for such action four years before.
.
@Another Mike:
See, this is why you believe lies: because you read made-up nonsense from known liars.
Stop reading garbage. Educate yourself. You can do better than this. You can be better than this.
@Rafer Janders: Ok, I’ll play along. Tell me the book I should be reading.
@Another Mike:
You should read reputable, well-sourced, honest books, magazines, newspapers and online sources: the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, the Economist, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the McClatchy and Knight-Ridder syndicates, Reuters, the AP, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC, NPR, the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, etc.
You should read people who openly and transparently source their reporting, who give you links to primary sources and transcripts.
You should refer to original sources — such as Congressional research reports and official US and other government databases — yourself.
You should read books by knowledgeable, experienced and trusted writers who do primary research and interviews and are knowledgeable about their subject matter, men such as James Fallows, David Remnick, etc.
You should cross-reference.
You should read Snopes.com.
You shouldn’t, however, read books by hate-mongers and paid professional liars such as David Horowitz, who occupy the same rung as people like Ann Coulter. You shouldn’t read books by people who cheerfully lie and will twist or obscure any fact in pursuit of an ideological agenda.
Educate yourself. Don’t live in ignorance.
@Rafer Janders:
Above all else, be skeptical of what you read. Think about it. Consider the sources, and the writer’s self-interest and bias. Balance it against what you’ve read before. Consider if it makes sense, or if it’s too easy and flatters your prejudices. Read. Reconsider. Then reconsider again. Think.
And heck, read James Joyner and Doug Mataconis. I often disagree with what they say, I often consider their conclusions stupid, but I don’t consider them fundamentally dishonest. They provide clear links to their sources, they don’t make things up. You can see where they’re coming from.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
And, by every conceivable objective measure, HE HAS DONE THIS. Not nearly as well as I had hoped — Obama certainly has been a disappointment — but not only is the nation much better off than it was when he took office, he has reversed the direction of the most pernicious trends.
Obama is a failure when compared against what he could have been, but he’s George Freakin’ Washington compared to Dubya.
@Another Mike:
If you’re interested in other sources of information about our foreign and military policy, I suggest Daniel Larison’s column at The American Conservative:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/
@Rafer Janders: Thanks, I’m already being skeptical of what I read.
plus there’s the issue of our current senate majority leader, secretary of state, former sec of state (and probable presidential candidate) who all voted in favor of the war, before they were against it.
@the Q: i seriously doubt there’s much influence at all via the msm. if it were, then we’d rarely hear about Israel launching attacks to defend themselves against attacks.
@al-Ameda: If Obama is compared to Chamberlain, then who has the role of Von Ribbentrop ?
@Rafer Janders: Here, feel free to see for yourself. Al Gore in all his shrieking glory.
And the New York Times? How many times have they been busted?
As for several of the rest… feh.
@bill:
Then of course there’s the fact that ACTUAL inspections to find WMDs turned up exactly ZERO WMDs, calling into question the entire premise upon which Bush made the case to go to war over there.
It was easy to believe that Hussein had WMDs because he used sarin gas against his opponents prior to the first Gulf War. However, once those WMD inspections showed there to be no WMDs, people like Reid, Kerry and Clinton realized that they’d been had by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice – that the entire premise for the war was a fraud.
That’s why Cheney is out there right now, to make sure that he isn’t blamed for the mess that is Iraq.
@al-Ameda: Oh, look how many people want to keep re-fighting something from 11 years ago JUST so they don’t have to acknowledge that Obama has the responsibility to deal with things falling apart all across the Middle East.
And I’d point out just how much bullshit is in your summary, but I don’t want to give you even more excuses to avoid the current reality.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
So you have nothing but,”Cheney was (and is) right?”
Obama is authorizing advisors, that is more than enough to provide Al-Maliki with, given his recent desire to be done with the United States.
Feel free to point out my bulls***. I have not misrepresented a single thing with respect to the War in Iraq.
@al-Ameda: Feel free to point out my bulls***. I have not misrepresented a single thing with respect to the War in Iraq.
Nah, not this time. Not the time or place, I think. Besides, I get tired of chasing the goalposts when your side starts haring all over the field.
Obama is authorizing advisors, that is more than enough to provide Al-Maliki with, given his recent desire to be done with the United States.
Obama is sending 300 advisors. Why does the number “300” and “Persians” fill me with such trepidation? Oh, yeah, that’ll end well this time, I’m sure.
And we’re “just sending advisors” into what is turning into a civil war? That has a rather distinguished history, as well — especially when it’s a Democrat sending in the advisors.