In case you missed it today (and you probably did) Brian Stelter of The New York Times wrote a prominent piece on Katie Couric and some of the other TV anchors FINALLY fessing up to maybe not doing such a hot job on Iraq coverage.
Not exactly news to us. One hopes it wasn't news to Katie, but certainly the Scott McClellan publicity has caused numerous talking heads to finally face the issue, even if some are denying doing anything wrong.
I am quoted in the story blasting the media for not coming to grips with all this long ago, as revealed most recently in the lack of media self-assessment at the 5th anniversary of the invasion (which I wrote about here two months ago).
Here's my paragraph in the story:
From the article:
Greg Mitchell, the author of "So Wrong for So Long," a book about press and presidential failures on the war, argues that some media organizations have yet to come to terms with their role. Even at the fifth anniversary of the war last March, he said, "in the orgy of coverage of what had happened, there was almost no media self-assessment."
The story notes that Katie Couric, the anchor of CBS Evening News, said on Wednesday that she had felt pressure from government officials and corporate executives to cast the war in a positive light:
"Speaking on 'The Early Show' on CBS, Ms. Couric said the lack of skepticism shown by journalists about the Bush administration’s case for war amounted to 'one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism.' She also said she sensed pressure from 'the corporations who own where we work and from the government itself to really squash any kind of dissent or any kind of questioning of it.' At the time, Ms. Couric was a host of Today on NBC."
On the other hand, there is good old Charlie Gibson, who says, ""I think the questions were asked. It was just a drumbeat of support from the administration. It is not our job to debate them. It is our job to ask the questions."
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Mitchell's book So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq (Union Square Press, $11) has a preface by Bruce Springsteen and a foreword by Joe Galloway.