The peaceful departure of the last U.S. combat forces from Iraq this week was another milestone towards the successful end of a war that many liberal journalists declared lost four years ago. Since early 2009, the war in Iraq has been a relatively low priority for the national press, which has focused on decrying the war in Afghanistan and cheerleading the Obama administration’s aggressive domestic agenda.
But over the last eight years — since journalists began decrying what they termed the Bush administration’s “rush to war” in August 2002, a full seven months before the first bombs fell — the Media Research Center has analyzed TV coverage of the Iraq conflict. The bottom line: reporters were obvious skeptics from the very beginning, and did all they could to push withdrawal and defeat before George W. Bush’s surge strategy saved the day.
A quick review of the media’s approach over the past eight years, with many links to the additional information that can be found at www.MRC.org:
Despite the claim that the media never "asked tough questions," an MRC study of all Iraq stories on ABC’s World News Tonight during September 2002 discovered that ABC reporters were nearly four times more likely to voice doubt about the truthfulness of statements by U.S. officials than Iraqi claims. Reporters also sanitized the "peace" movement, masking the radical affiliations of left-wing organizers while showcasing more sympathetic "middle class" demonstrators.
Writing in the New York Times the next morning, reporter David Chen compared it to the terrorist attack on New York City: “For some, the bombing brought back particularly visceral and chilling memories. They could not help thinking about Sept. 11, and how New York, too, was once under assault from the skies.”
But worst of all was NBC/MSNBC correspondent Peter Arnett, who reported lies about U.S. use of "cluster bombs" against Iraqi civilians. Arnett was later fired for denouncing the U.S. in a Saddam propaganda video just days before the regime toppled: “Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces....Now America is re-appraising the battlefield, delaying the war, maybe a week, and re-writing the war plan. The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance; now they are trying to write another war plan.”
■ Capture of Saddam Hussein: When the former Iraqi dictator was captured in December 2003, ABC anchor Peter Jennings sniffed that “there’s not a good deal for Iraqis to be happy about at the moment. Life is still very chaotic, beset by violence in many cases, huge shortages. In some respects, Iraqis keep telling us life is not as stable for them as it was when Saddam Hussein was in power.”
For a despot who killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, the coverage was surprisingly sympathetic. “The tyrant has fallen. But for some, he’s a fallen hero,” CBS’s Kimberly Dozer relayed. “Saddam Hussein also gave Iraqis dignity and pride. He became a symbol of defiance across the Arab world, never backing down from a fight....Those who loved him and those who hated him still can’t separate the man from the country in their minds. For many, his humiliation is their own.”
The media’s inordinately negative tone was both frustrating and perplexing to those with first-hand knowledge of the situation. On November 22, 2005, for example, the Washington Times ran a lengthy op-ed from an anonymous Marine in Iraq: “Morale among our guys is very high. They not only believe they are winning, but that they are winning decisively. They are stunned and dismayed by what they see in the American press, whom they almost universally view as against them....They are inflicting casualties at a rate of 20-1 and then see s*** like ‘Are we losing in Iraq?’ on television.”
While the networks were excited by charges of wrongdoing against U.S. servicemen, an MRC study of coverage from 2001 through 2006 found those news organizations gave just 52 minutes to the stories of America's highest-decorated soldiers in the war on terror. Fourteen of the top 20 medal recipients up to that time had gone completely unmentioned by the broadcast networks.
The networks remained openly skeptical eight months later as General David Petraeus gave Congress his first status report on the operation. “Insurgent attacks are down,” ABC’s Terry McCarthy noted on the September 9, 2007 World News Sunday, the day before Petraeus testified before Congress. But “Iraq remains a very violent place....Life in central Iraq is still deadly dangerous.” CBS’s David Martin contended: “Victory is not at hand, not even in sight.”
■ Little Time for Good News. By late 2007, however, the surge strategy denigrated by network correspondents had borne obvious fruit. But the reaction of the broadcast evening newscasts was to begin walking away from the Iraq story. Network coverage dropped from 178 stories/month in September 2007 to just 68 stories/month in November 2007. By February 2008, coverage had dropped to barely 40 stories/month.
The end of combat operations is really a postscript to what should have been the big headline, the success of the U.S. surge strategy in smashing the al-Qaeda fueled insurgency that was plaguing Iraq in 2006.
