Greg Mitchell | The Nation

The banner headline atop The Huffington Post’s media page—for twenty-four hours running now—says it all: WRONG AGAIN. It involves a piece that I wrote, but I don’t think they are referring to me.

The Washington Post killed my assigned piece for its Outlook section this weekend which mainly covered media failures re Iraq and the current refusal to come to grips with that (the subject of my latest book)—yet they ran this misleading, cherry-picking, piece by their own Paul Farhi claiming the media “didn’t fail.” I love the line about the Post in March 2003 carrying some skeptical pieces just days before the war started: “Perhaps it was too late by then. But this doesn’t sound like failure.”

Here’s my rejected piece. The web-based uproar and protest generated massive traffic for that article on Sunday into Monday. I had posted it in nearly identical form here at The Nation last Friday.  Enjoy this fun (if pointed) response by Charles P. Pierce at Esquire.

Ten years ago, as the US invasion of Iraq began, and I was the editor of Editor & Publisher, I turned to veteran war reporter (then still at The New York Times) Chris Hedges for insight on what was going on—and what was likely coming. On most questions, his was a minority voice. Also, as it turned out, quite prescient.

He told our reporter Barbara Bedway that the US military’s use of embedded reporters in Iraq had made the war easier to see and harder to understand. Yes, “print is doing a better job than TV,” he observed. “The broadcast media display all these retired generals and charts and graphs, it looks like a giant game of Risk. I find it nauseating.” But even the print embeds had little choice but to “look at Iraq totally through the eyes of the US military,” he pointed out. “That’s a very distorted and self-serving view.”



To Hedges this instantaneous “slice of war” reporting was bereft of context. After a few days passed and the US made its relenteless way toward Baghdad, he told Bedway that reporters have a difficult time interviewing Iraqi civilians, and many don’t even try, he says: “We don’t know what the Iraqis think.” The reporters are “talking about a country and culture they know nothing about…. My suspicion is that the Iraqis view it as an invasion and occupation, not a liberation. This resistance we are seeing may in fact just be the beginning of organized resistance, not the death throes of Saddam’s fedayeen.

Thomas Friedman wrote that the United States didn't need to find weapons of mass destruction to justify the war (Michael Wuertemberg, CC 2.0).

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the US attack on Iraq on Tuesday we may face more media coverage of that tragic conflict that we’ve seen in the past two or three years combined. How much of it will focus on the media misconduct that helped make the war possible (and then continue for so long)? We will see, and I’ll be charting it all here.

The selection of a new pope from Argentina—and questions about his relationship with the dictators who ran that country for so long—should provoke more interest in the Chilean film No, just released in the US following its selection as one of the five Oscar nominees for best foreign film.

It explores the 1988 plebiscite, called in a surprise (but supremely confident) move by longtime dictator Augusto Pinochet, one of the generals whose 1973 coup, backed by the US, overthrew elected Socialist president Salvador Allende. Pinochet was under increasing pressure from abroad—even from the Pope, in a recent visit—to move toward democracy and so he ordered a straight up or down vote on whether he should remain president, figuring that since he controlled all of the main institutions in the country, including the media, he would get a slam-dunk “si” tally.

It didn’t quite work out that way and to the shock of many, in and out of Chile, more than 54 percent would vote “no”—and the country has never looked back, except to condemn the torture and killings and disappearances of that era.