I remember following news during the buildup to that war. It was fairly obvious that those WMD claims was weak, and that was definitely brought up in the news. While I was mostly following European sources, so American sources might have been less insistent on that. But seriously, if your country wants to go to war, and local news sources is the only thing you look at. Then you aren't trying very hard to stay informed, and if you are fortunate enough to speak English, there is so many serious news sources out there with different viewpoints it's crazy. So there is not much of an excuse.
I live in Europe so I did get my news from non-US media sources. There were a lot of reasons not to go to war, especially in the way the US did. There was no UN backing yet and there was no good plan what to do with the country once Saddam was gone. But claiming you knew that Saddam had all of a sudden given up all his WDMs doesn't seem like a very strong one. This man violated countless UN resolutions about WDMs in the past, and now he all of sudden went straight? How is that a reasonable assumption? Also, it's not impossible he did have them after all and just hid them well.
It wasn't UNREASONABLE but I wouldn't say it was VERY reasonable. At the time a number of traditional US allies did refuse to (openly) participate in the "Coalition of the willing". I think if you got your news from non-American and non-British sources at the time, I think there was far more uncertainty and doubt that Saddam had such weapons. I have heard this line before "Everybody at the time thought it" but I genuinely saw most people around me calling bullshit. There was a big sense of a grasping of straws from US intelligence, such as aluminium tubes being great evidence of nuclear development, and "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud".
In fact it was remarkable just how much more bias the American media was then the global media at the time, and it doesn't seem to me like the American media had any special reason to be more confident that Saddam was nuclear than any of the media in the rest of the world. My theory wasn't that American mainstream media outlets like WaPo and NYT were going out of their way to start a war under false pretences, it was more that they had a lot of incentives to be bias in a pro-war direction.
Sometimes I feel like I was taking crazy pills, but I distinctly remember major news agencies like the BBC calling BS with pretty hard facts about the whole WMD thing, but no one really cared. (In America or Britain anyways)
How most of the mainstream media, in the US at least, nauseatingly wrote about the WMD theory which was the main stated reason for the US to go to 2003 Iraq war. That region is still reeling with consequences of that war and not to speak about trillions of $$ spent, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and nuclear contamination and so on and on.
Perhaps you're right, but at the time, most mainstream media was simply reporting on what the executive branch had already claimed was proven: Saddam had WMDs. At the time, there were no government/intelligence officials saying otherwise. The media had no strong reason to doubt the government's claims before the war started, as well as no way to validate or disprove the claims. And it's not like it would've been the most shocking revelation in the world if it were true; Saddam was a despot who had undoubtedly heavily researched, developed, and used WMDs in the past and had motive to continue stockpiling WMDs.
The media certainly should have been more skeptical and critical of the government, but I'd say at that early stage, the blame mostly falls on Bush and his advisors. If you were working at one of these news outlets at that time, I bet you would have reported it similar to the rest of the mainstream media, too.
Major news sources reported on the Bush Administration's claims that Iraq had WMD, which is what they should have done, and which is much different than the implication in your statement, that the source of those claims was the media itself.
Considering the US media completely swallowed the WMD lies and that the most popular news outlet in America is Fox News (WTF) which has all the characteristics of a state run channel... the US media hasn't done a very good job of speaking truth to power.
The current Presidency has put some of these issues in sharper contrast, but the Iraq war was a total failure of the US media to do their job (IMO).
The media consistently favored pro-war sources and ignored anti-war sources during the run up to the Iraq war. Publicly holding an anti-war opinion was a dangerous career move in the media at that time.
Journalists like Judith Miller of the New York Times were accused of being "stenographers" who reported whatever they were told by sources in the government without doing any independent verification, with many of the claims they reported later being shown to be false. They would report on things like Colin Powell's testimony to the UN on Iraq rather uncritically, when Colin Powell's own privately stated opinion of the draft of his speech was, "This is bullshit".
The effect of this was that the US public was misinformed about the role of Iraq in terrorism and the 9/11 attacks, as shown by surveys where a majority of the public would get the facts wrong about basic questions surrounding Iraq and 9/11, and both the public and politicians supported the war more than they would have if there was a more balanced debate in the media.
The argument is, basically, "If the US public knew the truth, they wouldn't have approved of going to war". Which of course is the case in most wars the US gets in - the role of the US media in the run up to a war is to make sure the public doesn't know the truth.
The WMD story was amplified by the media, there was no real investigative reporting done to find out the validity of the government's WMD claims and as a consequence the media helped the US raise an army that under wrongful pretexts started a war in the middle east.
I'm no expert but the news was a big part of causing American fervor when we started wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were united in a very unique way after the attacks and the news took advantage of that to drum up war support. We went to war with Iraq that literally had nothing to do with it. Wild when you think about it. I was young at the time and even I was calling for their country to be nuked. News 24/7 talking about the invasions.
The media is not supposed to simply parrot government talking points, at least not in a free society.
Even if Saddam did have WMDs, so what? So does North Korea and other hostile regimes, and so does the US. Couldn't the media have questioned whether or not that was a valid excuse for war?
That's the type of thing Phil Donahue of MSNBC did, and his questioning of the war got him fired.
History is important, too, but apparently not to them. Was it ever mentioned in the mainstream media that the US itself had provided billions of dollars in military equipment and support to Saddam, including dual use technologies used for chemical and biological weapons?
WMD story in Iraq was not made by the media, but by the US government, special agencies and the president himself, media only reflected that. Furthermore, you could find alternative opinions and doubts even then, while in Russia any voice that goes against the official propaganda gets silenced fast. It's not quite the same as staging video reports, lying or photoshopping photos.
Maybe they could actually investigate claims instead of repackaging government press releases? Pretty much everyone in the world knew how bullshit all those WMD claims were except for America and it's media (and to a lesser extent, UK and Australia).
The media were essentially cheerleading the invasion and deserve their chunk of responsibility for the invasion and it's fallout.
> And then again, your media all saw proofs of WMD in Iraq
I'm an American and maybe completely out of the loop but I never saw any news report that WMD was discovered in Iraq. I'm guessing it may have been circulated online but the news I watched never reported it from my memory.
I can give an example from the New York Times relating to the Iraq War, I took it from wikipedia [1]:
In the buildup to the 2003 war, the New York Times published a number of stories claiming to prove that Iraq possessed WMD. One story in particular, written by Judith Miller, helped persuade the American public that Iraq had WMD: in September 2002 she wrote about an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes which the NYT said were to be used to develop nuclear material.[83] It is now generally understood that they were not intended (or well suited) for that purpose but rather for artillery rockets.[84] The story was followed up with television appearances by Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice all pointing to the story as part of the basis for taking military action against Iraq.
The study mostly shows that the media let the administration frame how the situation was reported.
"This study supports four major findings about the media’s coverage of WMD during the three periods: 1. Most media outlets represented WMD as a monolithic menace, failing to adequately distinguish between weapons programs and actual weapons or to address the real differences among chemi-cal, biological, nuclear, and radiological weapons. 2. Most journalists accepted the Bush administration’s formulation of the “War on Terror” as a campaign against WMD, in contrast to coverage during the Clinton era, when many journalists made careful distinctions between acts of terrorism and the acquisition and use of WMD. 3. Many stories stenographically reported the incumbent administration’s perspective on WMD, giving too little critical examination of the way officials framed the events, issues, threats, and policy options. 4. Too few stories proffered alternative perspectives to official line, a problem exacerbated by the journalistic prioritizing of breaking-news stories and the “inverted pyramid” style of storytelling. "
Which is fair, I guess. But still, most news outlets internationally were doubtful that Iraq had WMDs and were vindicated after the war.
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