So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits, and the President Failed on Iraq

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So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits, and the President Failed on Iraq Pub. Date: 3/4/2008 Publisher: Sterling Publishing

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Overview

In early 2003, Greg Mitchell was one of the few mainstream journalists to seriously question the stated reasons for invading Iraq. In the years since, he has repeatedly challenged the media to probe the conduct of the war and its toll on our troops. Now, after five years of war, he traces the conflict – from the "runup" to the "surge" – and the media's coverage of it, in this important collection of commentaries with significant new additions: an original introduction and dozens of pages of fresh material that unify the essays.

If a free press is the watchdog of democracy, then Greg Mitchell must be the watchdog of the watchdogs, tracking the performance of the media at Editor & Publisher, the influential magazine of the newspaper industry. Over the past five years, in his widely read column, "Pressing Issues," he has repeatedly been ahead of the curve in intensely scrutinizing both the president and the press–and the controversies swirling around Donald Rumsfeld, Pat Tillman, "Scooter" Libby, Ann Coulter and numerous other figures.

His book is a unique history of the entire war &ndash and as topical as today's headlines. Whether writing early warnings that anticipated a long and bloody war, analyzing Stephen Colbert's in-his-face mockery of George W. Bush, or imagining the president confessing his sins to Oprah Winfrey, Greg Mitchell explores how we got into the war in Iraq–and why we just can't seem to get out. With tens of thousands of American troops still in Iraq, debate over the war continues to rage on TV news and across editorial pages. Against this backdrop of controversy, Greg Mitchell is the rare journalist who has seen it all with clear eyes. In So Wrong for So Long, he can finally tell the whole story.

What People Are Saying

Arianna Huffington

With the tragic war in Iraq dragging on, and the drumbeat for new conflicts growing louder, this is more than a five-year history of the biggest foreign policy debacle of our times—it's a cautionary tale as relevant as this morning's headlines. Read it and weep; read it and get enraged; read it and make sure it doesn't happen again.

Bill Moyers

A razor-sharp critique of how the media and the government connived in one of the great blunders of American foreign policy. Every aspiring journalist, every veteran, every pundit—and every citizen who cares about the difference between illusion and reality, propaganda and the truth, and looks to the press to help keep them separate—should read this book. Twice.

Glenn Greenwald

Greg Mitchell has established himself as one of our country's most perceptive media critics, and here he provides invaluable insight into how massive journalistic failures enabled the greatest strategic disaster in the nation's history. (Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com columnist and author of A Tragic Legacy and How Would a Patriot Act?)

Paul Rieckhoff

Anyone who cares about the integrity of the American media should read this book. . . . Examining the most complex issue of our time, he connects the dots like no one else has. (Paul Rieckhoff, Executive Director, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and author of Chasing Ghosts)

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

In this pertinent but ego-driven compilation of writings on the Iraq War, Mitchell, editor of media industry magazine Editor & Publisher, argues that, from the outset, the press did not adequately question the reasoning behind American operations in Iraq. Quoting his publication, Mitchell condemns the press's tendency "to accept the military's word first and ask questions later," citing specific examples like the media's blind approval of Secretary of State Powell's Feb., 2003, speech favoring a call to arms. Mitchell describes incidents like this as a symptom of the media's "failure of will" to probe matters of national security. His thesis-that a weak press deserves blame for the Iraq quagmire-is hard to argue with, but it's not exactly news. Still, he provides a valuable roundup of media reactions from across the spectrum, and his grievances are substantial. Ultimately, though, Mitchell is difficult to distinguish from the one-sided, single-minded figures he rails against; readers will learn a great deal about the media politics behind the Iraq war, but will have to decide for themselves how trustworthy a pundit Mitchell really is.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

As Keith Olbermann reminds us every weeknight, it's been some 1,750 days and counting since George Bush crowed, "Mission accomplished!" Editor & Publisher editor Mitchell further rubs Bush's nose in it, and commemorates other erroneous nabobs as well. This book gathers some five years' worth of Mitchell's media-watchdog opinion pieces from that august journal, consistent in their opposition to the Iraq misadventure and prescient in their having assumed from the first that Bush would indeed invade: " . . . as early as October 7, 2002, Editor & Publisher . . . was opening one story with ‘As the United States prepares to invade Iraq . . . " Mitchell was one of the first to question New York Times reporter Judith Miller's coziness with the administration and its claims through her of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's bunkers. He was also quick to criticize MSNBC news host Chris Matthews's assertion, on that very day of Bush's mission-accomplished declaration, "He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics." Matthews, one hopes, is reminded of that statement daily, and one hopes that the New York Times reporters who assured readers that the troops were coming home in May 2003 are reminded of their wrong call as well. The problem is one of complacency and complicity. Mitchell quotes Washington Post correspondent and Colin Powell biographer Karen DeYoung as having observed, quite rightly, "We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power." True, Mitchell suggests, but that's not the way it's supposed to be. Visiting such points on the timeline as the Pat Tillmandeath-by-friendly-fire coverup, the Miller affair (and her subsequent buyout) and the suicides of several American soldiers in protest against corruption, Mitchell charts how disastrously wrongheaded the war has been from the start, and how numerous and various the wrongheaded have been. A lucid chronology of error, worthy of shelving alongside the best of the Iraq books to date. Agent: Sarah Lazin/Sarah Lazin Books

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781402756573
Publisher: Sterling Publishing
Publication date: 3/4/2008
Pages: 298
Sales rank: 1,186,253
Product dimensions: 5.80 (w) x 8.90 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

Greg Mitchell is the editor of Editor & Publisher, the journal of the newspaper business which has won several major awards for its coverage of Iraq and the media. He has written eight books, including Hiroshima in America (with Robert Jay Lifton) and The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics, and his articles have appeared in dozens of leading newspapers and magazines. He lives in the New York City area. Joseph L. Galloway is one of the most respected war correspondents of our time and currently writes a syndicated column on military affairs. He co-authored the bestselling We Were Soldiers Once...and Young and the forthcoming We Are Soldiers Still. He was awarded a Bronze Star for valor in Vietnam.

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