Search -
Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq
Now They Tell Us The American Press and Iraq Author:Michael Massing, Orville Schell Over 500 reporters were embedded with military units to produce news coverage of the war in Iraq for American media outlets. As Michael Massing explains, this did nothing to prevent the coverage from being dependent on sources sympathetic to the White House. The embedded journalists saw only a small part of the war, while their colleagues back h... more »ome refused to report on the ample evidence showing the pre-emptive war to be misrepresented by the Bush administration. Meanwhile, reporters at the Coalition Media Center were afraid to challenge the information (or more accurately the non-information) they received at the military's press briefings because of the threat of not being called on in the future. The result was American coverage of the war that seemed to show "a war of liberation without victims." Since the end of the war, however, it has been a different story. The media as a group has begun to ask difficult questions about the evidence on which the war was based and on how that evidence was used. Massing highlights how the "contrast between the press's feistiness since the end of the war and its meekness before it" points to entrenched and disturbing features of American journalism.« less