Mitchell - So wrong for so long: how the press, the pundits-- and the president-- failed on Iraq

So Wrong for
So Long

How the Press, the Pundits
and the President
Failed on Iraq

G REG M ITCHELL

EDITOR OF EDITOR & PUBLISHER

FOREWORD BY J OSEPH L. G ALLOWAY
AUTHOR OF We Were Soldiers Once... and Young

PREFACE BY B RUCE S PRINGSTEEN

UNION SQUARE PRESS
An imprint of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
New York / London
www.starlingpublishing.com

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of
Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mitchell, Greg, 1947

So wrong for so long : how the press, the punditsand the presidentfailed on Iraq / Greg Mitchell; foreword by Joseph L. Galloway ; preface by Bruce Springsteen.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4027-5657-3

ISBN-10: 1-4027-5657-7

1. Iraq War, 2003Press coverageUnited States. 2. Iraq War, 2003Mass media and the war. 3. Iraq War, 2003Journalism, Military. 4. Freedom of speechUnited States. 5. United StatesPolitics and government2001-I. Title.

DS79.76.M5575 2008

956.7044'31--dc22

2007045258

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016

2008 by Greg Mitchell

Foreword 2008 by Joseph L. Galloway

Preface 2008 by Bruce Springsteen

Significant portions of these articles have been previously published by Editor & Publisher a division of

Nielsen Business Media, Inc. Printed with permission

The name Editor & Publisher and its accompanying logo, are exclusive trademarks of Nielsen Business

Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Distributed in Canada by Sterling Publishing

c/o Canadian Manda Group, 165 Dufferin Street

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6K 3H6

Distributed in the United Kingdom by GMC Distribution Services

Castle Place, 166 High Street, Lewes, East Sussex, England BN7 1XU

Distributed in Australia by Capricorn Link (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

P.O. Box 704, Windsor, NSW 2756, Australia

Manufactured in the United States of America

All rights reserved

For information about custom editions, special sales, premium and

corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales

Department at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com

In memory of John Bedway, proud veteran

We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power.

Karen DeYoung, reporter, The Washington Post, 2004

Lets review the rules. The president makes decisions, hes the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell-check and go home.

Stephen Colbert, 2006

I would like to thank staff members at Editor & Publisher, especially Mark Fitzgerald, Shawn Moynihan, and Joe Strupp; my agent, Sarah Lazin; and the Nielsen Company for permission to reprint columns. At Union Square Press, a nod to my editor, Philip Turner, and to Hannah Reich for her fine detail work. Im grateful for the contributions of Joe Galloway and Bruce Springsteenhere and well beyond this book. Special thanks to Barbara Bedway for column ideas, commentary, and the catching of errors and typos in the original pieces too numerous to count. Although in this book there is much criticism of the medias performance, I want to emphasize my deep respect for the many journalists who have spent months or years in the war zone (some of them draw raves in the columns that follow, some do not), often risking life and limb.

GM

We live in a time when its never been more difficult to tell the truth from lies and lies from the truth. As a result, it has never been more important to have a free press that presents the truth without fear or favor.

Unfortunately, while our press may still be free, it has not been fully informing we the people. Greg Mitchells So Wrong for So Long goes a long way toward correcting some of the misconceptions that the media havent been ready to deal with and, just as importantly, the kinds of obstructions that have kept the media from fully doing their job.

The total effect of Gregs excellent book is to remind us all that we need to be more questioning, skeptical, and savvy than ever in assessing information thats presented to us. And we need to teach our children to do the same.

Bruce Springsteen
New Jersey
November 2007

In war, truth is too often the first casualty, and it is not just a president or a secretary of defense or assorted official spokesmen who do the killing. Our brothers and sisters in the media also participate in the execution. Greg Mitchell has taken that as his lesson in So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Punditsand the PresidentFailed on Iraq and, in so doing, has done a service for future generations of reporters, and I believe, for readers of the news.

Looking back to that fall of 2002 when war drums were beating loudly, and the president and his closest advisors spoke with certaintyand deceitabout Saddam Husseins possession of weapons of mass destruction and the danger he ostensibly posed to our country and our friends and allies, most in the media either swallowed it whole or timidly refused to do their jobs and question the official rationale for war.

The great gray lady, The New York Times, and the voice inside the Beltway, The Washington Post, put dozens of unquestioning reports on the Bush administrations claims about Saddams quest for a nuclear weapon on their front pages. The few reports that even suggested that some experts were questioning those claims were buried deep inside, among the Viagra ads.

The Times front-paged reporter Judith Millers breathless stories about Iraqs quest for WMD that came straight out of the mouths of a series of bogus Iraqi defectors. After the invasion, the paper of record ignored for too long the fact that Ms. Miller virtually became the ex-officio commander of a U.S. task force charged with searching Iraq for proof of nuclear ambitions and possession of vast quantities of WMD.

Did the national outburst of patriotism and an epidemic of American flag decals and flag lapel pins on the expensive suits of television anchors frighten those who had long believed that their newspapers set the nations agenda?

How could those agenda-setters and so many others in the media abandon their first duty to challenge and question the assertions of the politicians holding high office?

To his credit, Greg Mitchell was writing columns and putting out a pre-war cover article in Editor & Publisher that raised those and other important questions before the first American soldier ever planted a boot inside Iraq. Also doing critical reporting on the administrations claims were a few good people working in the Washington, D.C., bureau of Knight Ridder Newspapers: bureau chief John Walcott and reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel. I worked there with them and made my own contributions to some of the critical stories before the war began, and afterward. But it would be several years before the work of these Knight Ridder reporters was widely acknowledged.