Media Flop

More on the media's failure to adequately question the president during the propoganda blitz to approve the war in Iraq.

Katie Couric and a former MSNBC reporter both report pressure from within their network's corporations to match the country's then-fervor of patriotism following 9/11.

The Huffington Post (David Fiderer) is reporting that NBC and MSNBC News anchors Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams failed to report in their news shows about the March 7, 2003 findings by Muhamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency that there was no evidence to support the administration's claim that Iraq had even tried to create atomic weapons. This was eleven days before the invasion. The administration's own team later validated the ElBaradei findings.

To this day, NBC and MSNBC have failed to report on the story accurately, according to Fiderer. David Williams and David Gregory, of NBC, both state that their news channel had insufficient access to the inspectors or that the right questions were asked or that their job is not to debate the president, just to ask questions. Fiderer feels that NBC and its anchor and reporter are dissembling, since they knew and know that the weapons of mass destruction argument had serious flaws after the ElBaradei report to the UN (Andrea Mitchell, of NBC News was there as the report was given to the UN by ElBaradei on March 7, 2003).

Likewise, Dan Bartlett, formerly part of the Bush Administration, has said that the administration relied on faulty intelligence. But Fiderer believes that the media and the administration are "liars or or manipulators or propagandists" to use Bartlett's words. Fiderer calls Bartlett an out-and-out liar since the administration knew its WMD claim was bogus after the ElBaradei report.

I guess that I have to cross NBC news off my list as an accurate news source now, along with ABC. That leaves CBS, whose beleaguered anchor, Katie Couric, remains alone in her condemnation of media coverage, including her own.

I'd rather have someone be honest about their past failings than suffer the indignity of someone who tries to obfuscate their own complicity in the administration's unfettered propoganda campaign.