The media's coverage and advocacy of the Iraq war remains one of the most vexing problems in our politics. While many now agree that the traditional press overstated the case for war, underplayed opposition and tapped a decidedly unrepresentative and often biased punditocracy to debate our foreign policy, there's little consensus about how to fix the problems. And while the Internet has increased the political and business pressures on the traditional press, we don't know yet if new media will improve or further fracture our foreign policy debates. To tackle these questions, the Netroots Nation conference is convening an unusual panel this Saturday, which I'm moderating, with some important experts (and critics) on foreign policy, human rights and the media. So feel free to post comments and questions for:

Pulitzer-prize winning author and Harvard professor Samantha Power, who just published Chasing the Flame; Emmy-award winningNew Yorker writer and Berkeley journalism professor Mark Danner, author of The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (and vigorous debater of Iraq hawks from Kristol to Hitchens); Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, award-winning columnist and author of So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed on Iraq; and Joan McCarter, a front page blogger for DailyKos and former aide to Sen. Ron Wyden.

I hope the discussion will help pinpoint media failures in refereeing foreign policy debates and brainstorm specific ways to improve democratic discourse. That should be easy, in theory. For Iraq coverage, the liberal/netroots critique actually overlaps with the traditional media's stated goals of accuracy and balance. By relying too heavily on government sources from one party, most pre-war coverage misstated the threat and drastically underplayed opposition to the war among experts, political elites and the general public. According to one recent academic study:

Network TV stories in the eight months before the war quoted Bush administration officials for 29 percent of sources, while quoting Democratic officials for three percent of sources. The war pundits were shockingly unrepresentative of political reality. And grassroots antiwar groups "comprised just 1% of all quotes, making such dissent a drop in the bucket."

So even when activists build large movements--some of the Iraq war protest broke world records--media malpractice can limit their impact. And the virtual media blackout of Democratic opposition to the war, even as most Democratic congresspersons voted against it, exacerbated tensions between the progressive base and incumbents with a misleading narrative. Joan adds:

When the few dissident voices that were heard on a national stage rose up, they were easily dismissed. ...And when it became increasingly clear that [the press], along with our Congress and the rest of the nation who lived inside the Beltway or voted Republican, was duped into going into war, it became increasingly important to not admit that. Which, I believe, is one of the reasons that the bombshell New York Times expose on the military/media propaganda machine was greeted by the rest of the media (and The Villagers) with nothing more than a resounding yawn. [It] should have been a game-changing revelation...

So how can activists make the media live up to its own mission and report reality in foreign policy debates? How can the public influence who is anointed to shape our nation's war punditry? And will the general public's antipathy towards the media ever translate into greater media accountability in this area?

Those are some of the questions, and we welcome more questions, ideas and comments from readers before Saturday. This is an open source panel, of course. (Post below or email me at amelber-at-hotmail.com.) Let's get to work.

Related:

Conference link for War Pundits Panel, 10:30am Saturday Ustream link for viewing. War pundits post at DailyKos WesPac post on the panel

Comments (4)

1. "And grassroots antiwar groups "comprised just 1% of all quotes, making such dissent a drop in the bucket."

   Seems then that you got the proportional viewing that you merited. If you are 1% of the population, why should you get an overstated representation?

   Posted by lvliberty1 at 07/17/2008 @ 10:24am

2. One of the biggest problems is that even a those who were factually and predictively right about Iraq have been punished and those who were wrong have been rewarded. After it had become clear that essentially everything those who opposed the war warned would happen did, Robert Scheer (to name just one example) lost his column in the Los Angeles Times, and Bill Kristol got one at the New York Times.

   The views of conservatives as well as progressives should be heard, of course, but if the mainstream media had any commitment to truth and balance, they would have replaced the discredited neocons with the sort of anti-war, anti-imperial conservatives who write for the American Conservative and Antiwar.com as the voice of the Right. Of course, at this point the "liberal" hawks from the New Republic, etc. deserve to be just as discredited as the neocons they enabled...

   Posted by LibertarianLeft at 07/17/2008 @ 12:55pm

3. As far as I can tell the media is still in the bag for this administration...almost every Republican talking point is being picked up and parroted by the cowardly Corporate Media, and inconvenient truths that might hurt McKrusty are ignored. The real flip-flopper has been McCain, but the label is starting to attach itself to Obama...

   And it takes no show of bravery to bash the Bush administration now that it's been revealed as the criminal cabal it is...even McKrusty is joining in and bashing poor little Bushie.

   And I have no doubt if this criminal administration attacks Iran, the MSM will fall all over themselves to find reasons why this was absolutely necessary for the security of this country...

   And the spineless Dems, fearing they will be called obstructionist and unpatriotic, will follow like the cowardly sheep they are.

   Posted by wagonjak at 07/18/2008 @ 12:21pm

4. Most of us simply watch the media distortion of Iraq and Afghanistan as if caught up in some great video game. We aren't shocked by the daily My Lai's or the little girl running down the street in front of a fire bomb with no cloths on. We see American soldiers shooting but no one dies. We don't see the contorted grief stricken face of the thirteen year boy whose family has just been blown away. We have to rely on the foreign press for those images and who has the time? Has anyone looked at a map. China and Russia have held joint military exercises. China has a contract to purchase large quantities of oil from Iran. We have shipped our industrial base out of country. How many countries are nuclear powers now? I don't think that the world is going to be as patient with us today as they were on Vietnam. We seem to think that this is some great game, and if a few million people have to die, oh well. I love the America that my dad left me, I hope my two kids can say the same.

   Posted by julien38 at 07/19/2008 @ 06:14am