How could we have known that the what the President and other administration officials said about the threat posed by Iraq was flawed and/or patently false? How could we have known that what we all figured would be a nice, short, tidy little war, with great patriotic visuals for the folks back home (for that is what the administration promised us), would turn into a sectarian bloodbath and 5 year plus counter-insurgency quagmire? We asked all the hard questions and the President, and even Colin Powell, gave their word that this unprovoked war was necessary. Heck, it was even desperately urgent to save us from a nuclear strike that would make 9/11 look like a walk in the park. How could we have known?!
As Salon's Glenn Greenwald points out, in reviewing McClellan's book, Tim Rutten, the LA Times media "critic," joins the choir of voices defending those journalists who couldn't be bothered with doing their jobs, i.e. acting as independent inquirers as opposed to White House stenographers. According to media "critic" Tim Rutten:
The news media, no less than the nation, endured a wrenching trauma on 9/11 and no less than any other institution in society felt the moral obligation to demonstrate solidarity with a country under deadly threat. In that situation, not giving the administration the benefit of the doubt, when it presented "facts" it said were based on the best and most sensitive intelligence available from the CIA and other spy agencies, would have been mindlessly adversarial. Moreover, since the media lacked the ability to do original reporting on the ground in Iraq, what basis would there have been for contradicting the administration's assessment of Saddam Hussein's aims?
Greenwald highlights the absurdity of these comments.
There's that standard media excuse: it was impossible for journalists to do anything except spout what the government was telling them. . . . Apparently now, in the U.S., when our Government wants to start a war by attacking another country that hasn't attacked us, it's the duty of the media to presume that they're telling the truth about everything, and it would be extremely irresponsible -- "mindlessly adversarial" -- for them to do otherwise. I just can't even add anything to that.
For his part, NBC White House correspondent David Gregory is willing to level criticism at anyone besides himself and other reporters. According to Gregory, the fault that the American people heard only one side of the story, that of the Bush/Neo-Con marchers onto war, was the fault of, well, the American people. After all, according to Gregory, its not the press's responsibility to question the President when he lies the country into war.
I think the questions were asked. I think we pushed. I think we prodded. I think we challenged the president. I think not only those of us in the White House press corps did that, but others in the rest of the landscape of the media did that.
If there wasn't a debate in this country, then maybe the American people should think about, why not? Where was Congress? Where was the House? Where was the Senate? Where was public opinion about the war? What did the former president believe about the pre-war intelligence? He agreed that—in fact, Bill Clinton agreed that Saddam had WMD.
The right questions were asked. I think there‘s a lot of critics—and I guess we can count Scott McClellan as one—who thinks that, if we did not debate the president, debate the policy in our role as journalists, if we did not stand up and say, this is bogus, and you‘re a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn‘t do our job. And I respectfully disagree. It‘s not our role.
As Greenwald and others have noted, some reporters were doing more than reprinting the administration's dire warnings and fear mongering talking points. Take for example the McClatchy organization, whose excellent reporting before the war demonstrated the hollowness and outright falseness of the administrations justifications for war. I guess Rutten of the LA Times must find it hard to understand how they could have gotten the story right. I guess they were just acting "mindlessly adversarial."
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