05/01/09 – Greg Mitchell – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing our first guest, the great Greg Mitchell.
He's the editor of Editor & Publisher, and is the author of a great many books, in fact, including The Making of the President, 2008, and So Wrong for So Long, How the Press, the Pundits, and the President Failed on Iraq, and I follow him about every 15 seconds or so on Twitter.
Welcome back to the show, Greg.
How are you?
Well, I don't post there quite that often, but I try to do what I can.
Yeah, no, it's good.
It's just twitter.com slash Greg Mitch, right?
That's it.
All right, there you go.
Twitter.com slash Greg Mitch, if you guys want to follow him on Twitter there, which is worth it.
I mean, breaking stories at your fingertips before anybody else, oftentimes.
You've been a great help to me just in the last couple of weeks since I signed up for the thing.
Well, I was a skeptic of Twitter for, what, two years, and tried it out starting a month or so ago, and found it to be a tremendous news tool, scoop tool.
I don't think I've posted once about what I had for breakfast or anything like that, but I found it, and I think others are finding that, that it is a tremendous way to get immediate information and get links that you don't have to wade through news sites or blogs or anything else.
You read one sentence and you get a great link, and it's been very surprising for me.
Yeah, yeah, me too.
I wasn't sure.
The letter limit and all that, I was kind of skeptical going in as well.
I only just signed up a couple of weeks ago, and maybe only one week ago or so.
Maybe two.
But, yeah, it's just been great.
Headline and a link, you know.
Holy crap, everybody, look at this.
Bam.
It's great.
All right, and including this.
This is where I found this.
It's also the picture, the spotlight today on AntiWar.com.
There's a big picture of a goofball grin, George W. Bush, dressed up like Top Gun with his Mission Accomplished banner on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego.
And you have this great piece at editorandpublisher.com.
A sixth anniversary look back at media coverage of Mission Accomplished.
And I guess if we could just start here with you sort of giving us how you remember that day exactly, and then maybe you can share with us some of these quotes.
Well, to refresh the memory of people, it came about three weeks or so after the fall of Baghdad.
And one thing I do in my book, So Wrong for So Long, and one reason I think it's valuable, is that it recounts the five years of media coverage and miscoverage of the war.
So you can kind of relive as the years passed, and who imagined it would ever be this many years.
But as the years pass, you start to forget the sequence of events and when things happened and why and everything else.
So it is useful to be reminded that the fall of Baghdad was in early April, and then Bush did his flying stunt about three or four weeks later.
And even at the time, not second guessing or Monday morning quarterbacking, even at the time I was appalled with the coverage.
I had actually been on Bill Moyers a few weeks earlier, in which he and I agreed that the story of the U.S. and Iraq was just beginning, not coming to an end.
And yet most in the media seemed to believe that we were going to be wrapping things up quickly, and there already was plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise, because again something you tend to forget is that there were riots in the streets, even beyond the pillaging and plundering.
We all remember carrying out the artifacts from the museum and all that kind of stuff, and people rolling TVs down the street.
But there also was already riots and gunfire and American soldiers being killed and so on and so forth.
And so all the people who had warned that we went in there, that the easy part would be the victory in the actual war, and that the hard part would come afterwards.
What has happened since has not been a surprise at all, but it seemed to shock most in the media.
Yeah, I don't know exactly what they thought was going to happen.
The administration, it seemed like in the run-up to the war, like in the Cincinnati speech for example, at the very end of the speech he says, oh yeah, by the way, this is going to be great for the people of Iraq too.
But it certainly wasn't about them or whatever.
But they never really wanted to address what exactly is it going to be like for the people of Iraq after the regime change.
Who are you going to regime change it to?
Chalabi or what are you going to?
They never wanted to talk about that.
It was sort of like everything was the build-up to the day that we can say go, and cross the line in the desert and invade the place, and then we'll figure out everything else later.
It's clear in retrospect that if it wasn't at the time, was that the whole point was getting rid of Saddam, and they didn't care how or what happened after.
So it was almost like you get the head on the wall and the trophy, and then whatever happens, it happens then.
That's the real damning thing.
Everything about it was cooked up and regrettable.
But when you see clearly in retrospect what the real goal was, which was simply get rid of this guy without a long-term vision or vision about what's best for the people and what's best for our own troops, it becomes even more appalling.
I'm really fascinated by the ignorance of the media.
It seems strange to me that a kid in the chaos garage all through 2002 and 2003 can know better than all of this stuff and know better than all of these people.
I mean, Chris Matthews is a guy, for example, who you quote here, calling Bush a hero.
He won the war.
He's great.
Women like a guy like George Bush.
Blah, blah, blah.
And here's a guy who, as we all know, has spent his entire life in politics.
He ought to be brilliant.
He ought to know a million things.
I don't know.
And yet I knew way better than him just because I was reading antiwar.com, which had links to Knight Ritter and Christian Science Monitor articles, and he didn't, or what?
Well, that's one of the many myths of which there are so many about the war and the buildup to the war was that people tend to say now, or at least the media and conservatives tend to say, there was a very popular war and people were behind it and everyone was cheering it on and we're all in the same boat now.
We all believed in the intelligence.
We all thought it was the right thing to do.
And now the liberal types are saying that it was wrong and they always thought it was wrong.
Well, if you go back, and again, it's all in my book and in other books, I guess, but the massive demonstrations, but more than that, the polls, which showed that when we launched the invasion, around the eve of launching the invasion, at least 50% of the people, and even newspaper editorials, which I'm sharply critical of continually, but even half of the newspaper editorials around the U.S. were saying, well, we're not really opposed, we're not necessarily opposed.
It may be necessary, but hey, we don't think it's right now.
We don't think the inspectors were given enough time.
We don't think the negotiations were given enough of a chance.
They were not cheering on the invasion at that point.
So it's a myth to say that most Americans were clearly for the war and cheering it on.
So we need to do a little revision of history here, I think, and talking about the population as a whole, not just people who may agree with your viewpoint.
I went to anti-war protests in February and March in Austin, Texas, and there were tens of thousands of people there.
They weren't all plumb-lined libertarians like me.
They were people from all descriptions, and there were millions of people all over the world.
That was something that I think many of these same characters in the media actually, I don't know what else to call it other than they conspired to cover that up.
That's why I cited polls.
We can all talk about demonstrations we've been to, and I'm sure we've all been to countless demonstrations which were quite impressive.
In the end, it was not the full slice of America, but the polls show that, like I said, at least half the people in the U.S. were not on board with the war.
Although, admittedly, because of the lies about the WMD and everything else, there's no question that most Americans were inclined to support or were sympathetic with getting rid of Saddam and were extremely worried about the mushroom cloud over America and everything else.
There's no question about it, but that, of course, was based on propaganda.
Secondly, even so, many of them did not want to go to war at that time.
Right, and that's really what's remarkable is it was split about 50-50, and yet if you Google the poll, go back and look, 70% of the people in this country at that time believed that Saddam Hussein actually was involved in the 9-11 attacks with Osama bin Laden.
Right.
Well, again, it's startling to go back and recreate that time.
I'm the editor of Editor and Publisher, which is kind of the Bible of the newspaper industry, so every day I'm faced with what's happening in the news media and not just newspapers.
I guess the point I make over and over, and I would make it again with the economic crisis, people wonder why newspapers and other media are falling in popularity so much.
There are many reasons, but one major reason that doesn't get enough attention is the abject failure in the run-up to the war and in the early years of coverage of the war.
I think coverage of the war has improved over time, but the run-up to the war, the early stages of the post-war, and now we see it again with the economic crisis where the problems and the crises were so severe with such long-range effects, out of proportion to any recent problems, I think the war and the economic collapse are the two worst things that have happened to this country in decades, and yet the media failed at both of them.
So you look at it and you say, well, why are people distrustful of the mainstream media?
Well, you know why right-wingers are, because they're told that everything is a lie and so forth.
But people in the middle and people on the left as well just recognize and know that these were enormous failures because of the enormous stakes.
The media has made mistakes all the time.
They've had failures forever, but it's not quite as consequential.
When you screw up on this magnitude of an issue, it is just crushing to your credibility, and I don't think that gets enough recognition for the current state of the mainstream media today.
Well, and I guess because so many of them were so bad on it, they have to all pretend like you were saying before that, oh yeah, all of America was as bad on it as we were, and we shouldn't all just be fired and have to go home and be replaced by people who are actually credible journalists.
They all have to protect each other and each other's reputations.
Well, again, it's the same thing with pundits.
If you're a pundit, you're going to be wrong some of the time, or you're going to be wrong a lot, or whatever your standards are.
Even probably if you want to pick your favorite pundit, you'll find times when that person is wrong.
But so many of these people were so wrong, and for so long, I guess, is the title of my book.
But it's such a consequential issue.
Again, you expect people to be wrong.
You're going to be wrong about a lot of things, perhaps.
But it's such an overwhelmingly important and tragic issue, and afterwards, there's no penalty for anyone.
It's just like a mulligan.
Well, you missed that, but you got this right, or your track record on this wasn't so bad.
Yeah, well, but maybe the track record was in fairly trivial matters, and your track record on truly important matters is horrendous.
But that doesn't keep you from getting banished from the editorial pages or pushed aside, or God help you, one of those things.
Yeah, these people never seem to get laid off.
Right.
Yeah, that's absolutely the case.
And, well, you know, Bill Moyers in his piece that he did, I guess, a couple of years back, Buying the War, he really focused on Warren Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay at Knight Ridder, and now McClatchy, and Bill Moyers.
And Bill Moyers is a great guy.
He really focused on Warren Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay at Knight Ridder, and now McClatchy Newspapers, who did such a good job in the run-up to the war.
And, you know, it's interesting that, you know, in Austin, looking on the Internet, their work was the top headline on antiwar.com in the run-up to the war.
And so this is the kind of stuff that I thought everybody knew this.
How can they still be talking about the aluminum tubes that have already been debunked for months and months and months?
Well, you know, it's, you know.
But apparently most people in D.C. and in New York, they hadn't read Landay and Strobel.
They didn't know these things that I did know.
Well, the problem was that Knight Ridder and now McClatchy, you know, were not in as many papers.
They don't have the visibility, and, you know, the renown of some of the others.
So the New York Times and the Washington Post would carry the day.
But the two reporters and John Walcott, who was editor and still editor of McClatchy in Washington, you know, they've told me that, in a way, they had a little more freedom because they weren't so much under the microscope and they were not so beholden to the usual sources.
They were thinking outside the box.
And, you know, by thinking outside the box, they were able to, even though they were based in D.C., they were able to break out of that D.C. mindset and scratch my back and I'll scratch yours and so on and so forth.
Judy Miller, of course, exhibited that.
And so, you know, that, in a way, their outsider status encouraged their good work.
But at the same time, their good work wasn't seen by as many people as Judy Miller's.
But there was, you know, as you know, there was plenty of great, certainly there was great stuff done by British reporters and others across the web in the U.S.
And it's just a matter of who you thought was credible.
Well, in your long experience in this field, is it, I mean, it seems to me like it's getting worse.
I mean, I had my beef with Tim Russert.
Honestly, I thought he was about the worst of the worst.
But David Gregory?
I mean, this guy's like a third of a Russert or something.
Are we like spiraling down a black hole here?
Well, you know, it's funny.
As years pass, sometimes you look at people from the recent past or distant past and they actually grow in stature when you see what's replacing them.
And, you know, I don't want to, since I'm a little older, I don't want to see it as an age thing.
But, you know, I look at some of these White House press conferences and it seems to me, and they're all younger people now, you know, just if you look at the press conferences, suddenly it seems like they waved a magic wand.
And, you know, Helen Thomas is still there and everyone else is under 40, you know, often under 35 or 30.
And it just seems like a lot of them don't have the same gravitas or don't have, there's not a mixture of some old hands who really could be tough at times.
Yeah, God help me when I miss Sam Donaldson, you know.
But it seems like when people are tough now, it's like a play.
It's like a presentation.
But, you know, do that as it may.
I don't want to sound like an old fart here.
But I think the good part of this all is that there's so many other places to get information, so many checks on these people.
You know, one of the most, you mentioned my book on the Obama campaign, and most of that book focuses on sort of the new media, new online tools, and gives a lot of credit to all that in Obama's victory.
But a lot of it just comes from the online fact-checking and online counter to what is still presented on the mainstream media.
And just to cite one example that I go into in that book is the whole, you know, if you think of the fall debates before the three presidential and the one vice presidential debate in the past, those would have just, whatever the media said about the debates, then would carry the day for a couple of weeks before polls came in and so forth.
And if you remember, each of those four debates last fall, when they ended, the mainstream pundits on TV, most of them said, you know, McCain did better than expected.
McCain was even with Obama.
He did well.
Palin, shockingly well.
She held her own with Biden.
She's going to help him get a big boost and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And 30 minutes later, not only did you have web counter to that, but you had, you know, the instant polls and focus groups, which were reporting that in every single case among those four, the actual people who had viewed this thought the Democrats had won in a landslide, two to one or more.
Even the Fox News focus group showed that.
So it was kind of embarrassing that you had these, you know, mainstream pundits on TV would then, after half an hour of their bloviating about how well the Republicans did, would then have to report that their own polls and focus groups were showing quite the opposite.
And, I mean, you could almost feel sorry for them because it was so embarrassing.
Yeah, well, I like that.
No, I don't ever feel sorry for them, but I do like it when they're humiliated like that.
And I did see that as well at the time, that it was almost, well, see, I'm not trying to, you know, make a wild assertion.
I'm just saying, in effect, it was as though they'd received instructions to pretend that it was a pretty even match or something, because they were all agreed that it was, even though it clearly was not.
Right.
Well, I mean, it's worth a study on its own, and probably people are doing it, maybe Nate Silver or someone's doing it, but, you know, just do a whole study on the four debates and the mainstream commentary and then what the people showed.
And it makes me wonder if the web networks and the web commentary and everything else that's grown since 2003 had been in place during the run-up to the war then, whether the results might have been somewhat different, whether the same kind of mainstream coverage and mainstream gassing about the war that we saw then, if there was more of this kind of online tools that have grown in the six years since then, seven years since then, possibly things could have been a little different, because there would have been much more of the anti-war sentiment that we know is there, but didn't really get expressed on TV that almost they would have had.
I could imagine people then cutting away from talking to some generals or something about how everyone was in favor of the war and how the evidence was so strong, and then saying, well, now we have a new online poll that shows actually 75% of the people don't believe it.
Right, all these tweets are coming in asking good questions.
Yeah, we're asking good questions and saying that, yes, they like Mr. Boies or they hate Saddam, but three out of four don't think we should go to war now.
Well, listen, I also think that a big part of the reason that, and I really don't know how to characterize masses of people in rank and file types, but many of the leaders of the progressive movement, writers online, people like Glenn Greenwald and a great many others, all the bloggers, Digby and all those people, they're still good on state secrets and on the wars and on a great many things that you might expect them to act like the right-wingers did when Bush got elected and then just roll over and accept everything that the new government does, but they've stayed quite critical of the Obama government, and I think it really is because of, well, what are you going to do with Glenn Greenwald?
You know he's right.
You can't pretend that he's dishonest in his argument against Obama if he's making one.
He sets a really high bar, and the online community has to basically live up to that.
Well, there's much more criticism or skepticism of Obama and the Democrats, especially Democrats in Congress, than there ever was from the conservative media about Bush and the GOP when they carried Congress.
A completely different world.
Now, there still are plenty of influential liberal sites that seem to be still very much in the tank for Obama, and I'm not saying they shouldn't be supportive or that Obama's bad or anything.
I just think healthy skepticism is called for, and certainly we've seen that on the left, and we didn't see it on the right, particularly, and I'm sure you can relate to this, so many people who were philosophically or politically against American interventions abroad, but yet rolled over for this particular one.
And we didn't see many conservative Republicans speaking out against the attack on Iraq.
No, certainly not.
I mean, there was the American Conservative Magazine, and antiwar.com has a certain conservative bent there.
We feature Ron Paul and Phil Geraldi and people like that, although he's kind of a new addition, but Justin Raimondo considers himself an alt-right kind of guy.
In fact, there was even an article that David Frum, of course, did in the National Review called Unpatriotic Conservatives, where he basically took all the antiwar conservatives and Eric Margulies and Pat Buchanan and Justin Raimondo and even Robert Novak and basically said, you know, all these people are anti-American and they're terrible and it's time for me to play William F. Buckley and read them out of the conservative movement, he said.
Well, look what we got.
Well, and I like to take the opportunity to give the liberals credit for not being nearly that bad.
But I want to ask you about one more thing before I let you go here, Greg, if that's all right.
The surge worked.
That piece of propaganda has been more successful probably than, well, anything since Hope and Change.
Do you think that the online media and the attention to the war, do you think it's getting better or worse?
How does it relate to the expansion and all the new innovation in the online community?
Because it seems to me like the antiwar forces are kind of dying out and that propaganda, even before Hope and Change got elected, that that propaganda about the surge worked, really, that worked better.
The online blogosphere could not counteract that line.
Well, I mean, it's a whole separate program.
There's a lot of reasons for the decline and outrage over the war.
You could even take the argument that the surge did work.
You could even say, wow, I'm glad things have turned around there and so forth.
But even if you accepted that, the fact is, and I hope we're reminded of it today with the coverage of the, well, I guess a little bit of coverage.
I mean, my article has been put up on all kinds of sites, on the front page of Huffington Post and all sorts of places today.
I can only imagine because there's been so few other ones.
So I thought there would be a little more coverage of the mission accomplished today.
But hopefully the coverage it is getting does remind people that we're still there more than six years later and that you could look at it two ways.
Even if you accepted that the surge worked, you'd still say, well, this is now over two years ago and we're still there and we're still spending zillions of dollars and we still have more troops there today than we had before the surge and we're in worse economic shape and we have hundreds of thousands of new vets who are going to be screwed up the rest of their lives perhaps.
Suicides are surging.
We're building these permanent bases and embassies and so on and so forth.
We're expanding in Afghanistan.
So even if you accepted that the surge worked, you'd say, I still wish we could go back to when we should have gone in the other direction then because what have we really accomplished?
There were three U.S. soldiers killed just today in Iraq.
We've had all the recent suicide bombings there.
We've had the warnings from the Tom Bricks and others that if and when we ever do pull out, we're going to fall apart again.
So there are a lot of reasons for people to be protesting.
There are a lot of reasons for people to be very upset about their Iraq and Afghanistan policy.
But at the same time, there are a lot of reasons for people to be worried about other issues and their own jobs and everything.
But what I don't like to see is people, including some major organizations, who are probably self-peddling their opposition to the war because they don't want to confront Obama and they don't want to put added pressure on him and they really don't want to offend him.
I think that's really the wrong approach.
All right, everybody.
That's Greg Mitchell.
He's the editor of Editor & Publisher.
That's at www.editorandpublisher.com.
He's the author of Why Obama Won, The Making of the President in 2008, which I haven't read.
But I have read and I really enjoyed.
There's a previous interview.
If you just Google my name and his or go to www.antiwar.com.
The previous interview was also really good about the other book, So Wrong for So Long, How the Press, the Pundits, and the President Failed on Iraq.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Greg.
Anytime, Scott.