By Bonnie Kristian, The Week
The behavior of the American press in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq is rightly notorious. So much commentary — left and right alike — as well as ostensibly objective reporting from our most prestigious outlets failed to scrutinize lies and propaganda from the George W. Bush administration, boosting American enthusiasm for a disastrous war.
“There was an attitude among editors: Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?” former Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks told CNN in 2013. Per a March 2003 analysis of two weeks of nightly coverage of Iraq by NBC, ABC, CBS, and PBS, only one of 199 “current or former [U.S.] government or military officials” featured as expert guests mildly questioned the wisdom of invasion.
As we mark the 19th anniversary of that invasion on Saturday, a new war has started amid a markedly different media climate. And a key question, raised by a symposium in which I participated this week at Responsible Statecraft, is: Why?
