Vietnam Flashback

The War's Lost Weekend

The media has finally come to realize what liberals have been telling them.

Perhaps no one exemplified the principles of Cheney-favored journalism more eloquently than the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the large station owner (and Republican contributor) that refused to broadcast "Nightline" on its ABC outlets. A spokesman, Mark Hyman, explained: "Someone who died 13 months ago — why is that news?" Been there, done that, I guess.

The administration has been coddled by this kind of coverage since 9/11, until fairly recently, and it didn't all come from Fox and Sinclair. Last Sunday, "Michael Getler, the ombudsman at The Washington Post, wrote that almost everything we were told before the war, other than that Saddam Hussein is bad, has turned out, so far, not to be the case: the weapons of mass destruction, the imagery of nuclear mushroom clouds, the links between al Qaeda and Hussein, the welcome, the resistance, the costs, the numbers of troops needed." He was arguing that, as good as much of the war reportage has been, "it is prewar coverage that counts the most."

If that coverage had been sharper, and more skeptical of administration propaganda, more of the fictions that sent us to war would have been punctured before we signed on. Perhaps a majority of the country would not have been conned into accepting as fact (as it still does, according to an April poll) that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda.