When the smoke clears on the Bush era and historians have a chance to take stock of the disaster, the list of American journalists to whom they can turn for the "first draft of history" will be short. Glenn Greenwald—one of the honorable few—did not spare his colleagues when he said of the Iraq War, "Massive journalistic failures enabled the greatest strategic blunder in the nation's history."
Joining Greenwald on this short roster would be shouters like Molly Ivins, Greg Palast, Michael Moore, Arianna Huffington and Bill Maher. Far less celebrated but more valuable to historians will be quiet scribblers like Paul Krugman, James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation blog), Bill Scher, Jacqueline Sharkey, David Brock, Kristina Borjesson and Greg Mitchell, all of whom toiled, week in and week out, to put breaking news within a larger context and hold the Bush-Cheney regime accountable.
Mitchell's work may, in fact, be the one most cited by historians. As editor of Editor and Publisher, journalism's trade journal, he could have buried his head in the sand like his colleagues. Surprisingly—rising as it did from the very belly of the beast—his weekly column was like a shot of truth serum offered to his colleagues, even if it went sadly unheeded. These same embedded flacks can now be found wringing their hands in dismay over the demise of the mainstream media outlets for which they toil.
Mitchell's prescient dispatches have been compiled and expanded in an excellent new trade paperback, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq (Union Square Press). The book, organized chronologically, is like a textbook of collective failure. It starts with a February, 2003 interview with Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg, who all but begs journalists to beware the mistakes of Vietnam, followed by an early March column (just days before Bush blundered into Iraq) called "11 Questions We Wish They'd Asked." "They" was the White House Press corps, who started cheerleading before the first rockets were fired in the Shock and Awe campaign.
Everything else is here, including Captain Codpiece's landing of a jet on an aircraft carrier. Chris Matthews, his loins swollen with pride, trumpeted, "He won the war! Everybody recognizes that except a few critics." Matthews' pandering is understandable, since he's a pathetic shill, but here's the lead sentence in the New York Times' coverage of the same event, by Elisabeth Bumiller: "President Bush's made-for-TV address tonight on the carrier Abraham Lincoln was a powerful, Reaganesque finale to a six-week war." (Bah dah bing). Later in the same article, the Times' stenographer writes, "The administration is planning to withdraw most U.S. combat forces from Iraq over the next several months." That was five years ago. The forces are still there en masse and the 4,000th soldier was killed this week.
On and on it unfolds, this disastrous tale: the downplaying of the Abu Ghraib torture, enabling of the WMD myth, refusal to show soldiers' coffins, the Judith Miller-Scooter Libby saga, the Rummy lovefest and the hollow blatherings of "moderates" like Thomas Friedman. Mitchell writes, "For three years, he has repeatedly declared that things would likely turn around there if we just give it another six months." Thus the "Friedman Unit" (or F.U.) was born; it's 11 F.U.s and counting. Heckuva job, Tommy!
Because only Mitchell and a few other journalists cared enough to cover this tale properly, the American people have been largely misinformed throughout the reign of King George and Lord Cheney. The tragedy is that the failures are still writing the news.
