Endless War Enablers
We'll be talking about this in the second hour of the show, a hugely important discussion. By now, we've all heard former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan confirm what we already knew about the mainstream media's endless hyping of the Iraq War. But now, some of the mainstream journalists who helped hype the war are coming out in agreement, including Katie Couric:
"Speaking on “The Early Show” on CBS, Ms. Couric said the lack of skepticism shown by journalists about the Bush administration’s case for war amounted to “one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism.” She also said she sensed pressure from “the corporations who own where we work and from the government itself to really squash any kind of dissent or any kind of questioning of it.” At the time, Ms. Couric was a host of “Today” on NBC."
CNN's Jessica Yellin also weighed in (we played the audio on the show yesterday, from her confession to Anderson Cooper), saying that journalists were “under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation.”
NBC's "Nightly News" host Brian Williams punted on the issue, but seemed to blame the media's shortcoming on fear of the Pentagon:
"Mr. Williams, who was an anchor on MSNBC at the time, emphasized the climate of “post-9/11 America.” In the early days of the war, he said, he would hear from the Pentagon “the minute they heard us report something they didn’t like.”"
This isn't surprising coming from Brian Williams, who on his blog recently defended his network's blackout in covering the NYTimes exposé on retired generals deliberately spreading Pentagon propaganda on TV networks.
|