By Givng A Platform to Iraq War Boosters, Is the Press Trying Hide Its Own Blame?

Like a rock but dumber

I am a strong advocate of a free and independent press/media which serves the role of informing the public, keeping the government and elected officials honest, and independently investigating policies and public statements.  It is the role that the Founding Fathers envision for the media.  Sadly, more and more often we see the media merely parroting statements of politicians and demagogues like Tony Perkins and others without ever asking hard questions or challenging statements that can easily be shown to be either untrue or highly questionable.  It was this failure of the press/media that, in my view, allowed the American people to be suckered by the lies of Bush/Cheney and their sycophants.  Now, with Iraq all too predictably falling into chaos, many press/media outlets are providing platforms to the very architects of the Iraq War disaster. It makes me want to scream at the television and yell WTF is wrong with you.  A piece in Huffington Post suggests that what's happening now is the media's attempt to throw a smoke screen around its own culpability in the Iraq disaster.  Here are column highlights:

The bad bout of 2003 déjà vu continued on Sunday when former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on ABC's This Week to lecture President Obama about how his policies had allegedly made a mess out of Iraq, as violence there continues to grip the country and threatens to completely destabilize the nation.

Cheney's appearance continues a maddening, week-long stroll down Baghdad memory lane as media outlets rush to get commentary from the people who, 11 years ago, got everything wrong about the Iraq War: The stunning cost, the causalities, the war planning, the intelligence, the sectarian violence.
All of it.

"The neoconservative program cost the United States several trillion dollars and thousands dead and wounded American soldiers, and it sowed carnage and chaos in Iraq and elsewhere," writes Harvard University professor Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy.

The head-scratching question continues to be, why? Why are the discredited "experts" who botched Iraq last time now being a given a platform to comment on the military crisis they helped create? And why are these rejected mouthpieces being given a chance to bash President Obama, someone who opposed the failed war in the first place? 

Why the strange rehabilitation? Here's a hint: People might be forgetting the deep bond that ran between the compliant Beltway media in 2003 and the very same failed Iraq War architects and partisan boosters the press is now turning to for advice. In other words, the Beltway press was part of the Iraq problem then. (They sold us a disastrous war.) So it's not that surprising the press is part of the problem now.

Fact: You can't talk about the Iraq War without addressing the central role the U.S. news media played during the run-up to the invasion, and the fevered and futile hunt for weapons of mass destruction. And that's why the current move to treat failed war sponsors as knowledgeable experts might also be seen as an effort by some journalists to put behind them the massive media missteps that led to the war.

Meaning, the reason the press doesn't think it's strange having the people who got everything wrong about the war on TV today is because so much of the Beltway press got the same things wrong 11 years ago.

[I]t's important to never forget just how much government stenography went on prior to the war in D.C. newsrooms, and just how little daylight existed between the Bush administration and media elites in their ironclad agreement about the need to invade Iraq. Only then does the continued symmetry now on display begin to make sense. 

The current rehabilitation tour brings back painful media memories. Like the fact that during the first two weeks of February 2003, when the debate about the war should have been raging on the public airwaves, of 393 people interviewed on-camera for network news reports about the war just 17 percent expressed skepticism about the looming invasion, according to a FAIR survey.

Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department, according to figures from media analyst Andrew Tyndall. Only 34 stories, or eight percent, were of independent origin.

Investigative journalism has become an unknown concept for many in the media who are either too lazy or too stupid (too many news anchors are selected for their looks, not whether they can think independently) and the nation has paid a horrific price for the media's failure to expose lying politicians and demagogues.  Bush/Cheney is in the running for one of the worse presidential administrations in 200+ years.  Why does anyone listen to Cheney whatsoever.  The man ought to be on trial for war crimes.