Rearview mirror.

AuthorRothschild, Matthew
PositionEditor's Note - Column

On the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, CNN's Christiane Amanpour asked, "How could so many false assertions be taken as fact" in the lead-up to the Iraq War? She wanted to know where the journalists had been. Well, most of the skeptical ones were working for the alternative media. On Democracy Now, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales repeatedly rang the alarm bells. So did our friends at The Nation and Z and In These Times. On talk radio, Randi Rhodes was presciently outspoken, as was Thorn Hartmann, who was just getting back in front of a mic.

Here at The Progressive, we began campaigning against the Iraq War more than six months before it began, publishing a cover story in August 2002 entitled "Stop the War Before It Starts," by peace scholar David Cortright. We followed that up with an editorial in October 2002 entitled "No Excuse for War," and we continued with a cover story "Oil Is Our Damnation," by Jeremy Scahill in December 2002. In fact, we ran three more cover stories in the prelude to the war, as well as columns by Molly Ivins and Howard Zinn, who predicted what has now happened.

Yes, there were a few mainstream journalists who got things right, most notably Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, as Amanpour noted. But overwhelmingly, the mainstream corporate media fell down on the job in the worst way.

It has become fashionable for the corporate media and liberal politicians alike to comfort themselves with the claim that "everybody" was snookered. Sorry, not true. Everybody wasn't snookered. We here, way out in Madison, Wisconsin, could figure things out. So could our colleagues in the leftwing media across the country. But those in the power centers somehow could not. They were blinded by their proximity to the decision makers. They were embedded with their sources. They were cowed by the fear of being called "liberal" or...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT