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Some PBS stations are re-broadcasting "Buying the War" the week of August 6, 2007. Check your local listings — or click to watch the whole program online!
Update
A number of media outlets, including THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, VANITY FAIR, THE NEW REPUBLIC and 60 MINUTES issued public mea culpas for the inadequacies of their pre-war reporting. Yet, some journalists and news consumers wonder if the situation has substantially improved — especially the coverage of the troop surge and intelligence assessments of the situation on the ground in Iraq.
Indeed, THE NEW YORK TIMES' public editor criticized the paper's seeming unwillingness to delve deeply into intelligence reports about the strength of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Clark Hoyt stated:
Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story. So is the question of how well their version of events squares with the facts of a murky and rapidly changing situation on the ground.
But these are stories you haven't been reading in THE TIMES in recent weeks as the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda's role in Iraq — and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution. -- "Seeing Al Qaeda Around Every Corner," July 8, 2007
The news about the news is still a volatile topic. In the weeks of mid-summer 2007, US NEWS & WORLD REPORT found that overall the media was reporting military progress in Iraq — but also covered an on-air and online battle over the relationships between the administration, "experts" and the American media scene.
The furor is over an Op-Ed published in THE NEW YORK TIMES on July 30, 2007 by Brookings Institution scholars Michael E. O'Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack. The editorial, entitled "A War We Just Might Win," argued that the administration's critics weren't giving the "significant changes" wrought by the surge enough credit.
Vice-President Cheney took to the TV airwaves and cited the Op-Ed the next day:
Vice President Cheney, on CNN's Larry King Live, said the surge has "made significant progress now into the course of the summer... Don't take it from me. Look at the piece that appeared yesterday in THE NEW YORK TIMES, not exactly a friendly publication -- but a piece by Mr. O'Hanlon and Mr. Pollack on the situation in Iraq. They're just back from visiting over there. They both have been strong critics of the war."
On FOX News' Web site, in a column entitled "The Truth About What's Going On in Iraq," Oliver North also cited the Op-Ed:
Now, even THE NEW YORK TIMES has had to acknowledge that the surge strategy is working by running an op-ed this week by Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the liberal Brookings Institution, in which they noted how strategic Al Anbar is now a model for the rest of the country.
But in his Salon.com column, Glenn Greenwald disagreed. Far from being what they described themselves "as two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq." Instead, Greenwald wrote "O'Hanlon and Pollack were among the most voracious cheerleaders for Bush's invasion and, as the war began to collapse, among its most deceitful defenders." And linked his blog to the two's previous writings.
Greenwald found the interplay between the media, the administration and the experts disturbing — again:
What is the most vivid and compelling evidence of how broken our political system is? It is that the exact same people who urged us into the war in Iraq, were wrong in everything they said, and issued one false assurance after the next as the war failed, continue to be the same people held up as our Serious Iraq Experts. The exact "experts" to whom we listened in 2002 and 2003 are the same exact establishment "experts" now.
Commentator Tucker Carlson has called Greenwald's article an attack by "hysterical" bloggers — and the debate over what's news goes on.
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