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Comment by breckenedge | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, are you implying that the media was simply parroting the lies about WMDs that led to the (second) Iraq war?

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Its not just that. I remember in the build up to the war CNN having lots of patriotic style coverage with how great the US armies were, how bad Saddam was (and his brother), lots of pictures of jets and battle ships. Once the war started there were lots of amazing shots of smart bombs doing amazing things, but no coverage of anyone living there on the receiving end.

All of that was just them dusting off the 1991 playbook from the first Gulf War. That was the first time an ongoing war was mass marketed in the "modern" way, I think (you could argue successful war propaganda has been happening for centuries through other media).

I even remember this thing at the Scholastic Book Fair that was basically a book-magazine thing and contained a large fold out map and a list of all the int'l military divisions that would be participating in Operation Desert Storm; essentially armchair generalship marketed to kids.

There is a lot of self-criticism from the media itself that more or less admits this. Here's a NYT article from 2004: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...

See also this article on Judith Miller's stories from 2001-2002 (she was forced to resign from the NYT): https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/

These aren't isolated incidents, but they were particularly egregious.

Miller was essentially a saboteur. She was primarily operating out of self-interest but used her position to promote false stories in exchange for access. And she was punished for her crimes.

NYT also ran Joseph Wilson's oped explaining the yellowcake accusations against Iraq were likely fabricated.

An apology and a retraction don't outweigh years of cheer-leading. They did serious harm by loaning W and his goons credibility. It's hard to overstate how responsible they are for the whole thing.

That is a part of it. Some organizations were better than others, but for certain publications/channels, it felt like their sole purpose was to coax the american public into endorsing another war, using whatever rationalizations necessary.

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