"Arguing for going to war in Iraq, we have Gen. Colin Powell. And representing the antiwar point of view, we have...Saddam Hussein."

Yeah, that's fair and balanced.

Great piece, Kevin!

But Garraffalo was on there! So they took it seriously!

After the David Barstow piece in last Sunday's Times, I'm reluctant to say anything on behalf of the electronic media: CNN, Fox, the networks. All of these let themselves be used as message amplifiers by military analysts being run out of the Rumsfeld Pentagon, and didn't even ask any questions.

Frankly, though, Kevin here highlights a real weakness of administration critics: their continuing expectation that the media should do their job for them. If there are no war opponents in Congress, the media should find them in academia; if only foreigners are speaking up against what President Bush wants to do, by God the media should go out into the streets and dig up some Americans.

The issue here, really, is not what the media's job is. It's what the job of administration critics is. When the Iraq war and the administration's terrorist policies were popular, the Democrats and skeptical Republicans who had something to lose declined to risk what they had. Sen. Clinton took no risks in fighting battles against the administration in Congress; then-Sen. Edwards didn't either. Sen. Biden did some talking, nothing more than that. Sen. Obama is getting a lot of credit now from Democrats because of one speech he made to an overwhelmingly sympathetic audience before he came to Washington.

You can't be respected as an opposition if you don't oppose. The people now loudest in their denunciation of administration policy now that it is unpopular were pretty darn quiet in the 2002-03 period. The electronic media does not have clean hands, as I said, but any discussion of why the public airwaves had a badly slanted discussion during that period has to start with the timidity of the administration's critics, what Tom Ricks called "the silence of the lambs."

Wait, are you saying that the American public doesn't take a global view of issues that affect the planet?

Seriously, it would be interesting to see the breakdown between Fox news and the rest of the networks.

I think Southpark did it best: "anyone who opposes the war ... is gay!"

The case for invading Iraq never really got above that level.
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The scariest fact I see are how pro-war religious leaders were. I understand they were (still are?) more pro-Republican than pro-Jesus but yikes, I would have expected a lot more religious leaders to try and calm the calls to war.

"plenty of Democratic politicians . . . opposed the war"??? As I recall, most democratic politicians at the time were either supporting it or trying to keep their heads down so no one would call on them. Their having wussed out in the face of Bush's overwhelming popularity and America's bloodlust at the time is the very reason we're in this immoral and economic nightmare.

IMPEACH!!!1-202-225-0100---I called today, now its YOUR turn.

I notice that according to the chart some of the quotes supposedly opposed to the Bush policy came from the Bush Administration. This might lead one to wonder about their definition of "opposed".

Presumably the foreigners quoted in the news as opposed to the war weren't primarily concerned with advancing American interests. The data therefore suggest that ABC and CBS did not provide balanced coverage of the question of whether it was in America's interest to invade Iraq.

I agree with Zathras--there weren't many prominent spokesmen against the war in the U.S. Many people had learned a lesson in opposing the first war (Sam Nunn, for one). And Bush still had great approval ratings. And those of us who were momentarily dubious about Afghanistan 2-3 weeks after the start of operations had our doubts resolved and faith in our judgment undermined by the rapid collapse of the Taliban.

Hindsight is great, but even a lefty like the late Mary McGrory was on board after Powell's speech.

The number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq this month is up to 38- one less than last month, and two less than January.

The gains of the surge are reversing right before out eyes. From sinking down to 20-somthing deaths one months, the trend has been back up over the past few months. Pretty soon we'll be back up to something like pre-surge numbers of casualties each month. And it was reported that 12,000 of our veterans attempted suicide last year.

Funny you don't see a story about the casualties in the news.

Zathras wrote that war critics should not expect that "if only foreigners are speaking up against what President Bush wants to do, by God the media should go out into the streets and dig up some Americans"

It was certainly NOT "only foreigners" speaking out against the war.

And not only did the media not "go out into the streets and dig up some Americans" who opposed the war, but the corporate-owned mass media buried the tens to hundreds of thousands of Americans who took to those streets in mass protests against the war, both before and after the invasion.

The peace rallies at the beginning of the Iraq war were the largest since the Vietnam war protests, which only occurred many years into the war, and if the mass media covered the protests at all it was only in passing and aimed at minimizing, marginalizing and dismissing them.

The corporate-owned mass media was brazenly complicit in actively promoting the Cheney/Bush administration's long-planned war of unprovoked aggression against Iraq, from the trumpeting of Bush's sickening lies about a nonexistent "threat" to the news blackout of massive domestic opposition to the war.

This study doesn't refute the claim that the corporate media suppressed antiwar voices, it proves that claim is true. The media not only suppressed American antiwar voices, it deliberately and actively created the false impression that only foreigners -- ie. "enemies" like the Iraqis, "traitors" like the French, and "anti-Americans" like the UN -- were opposed to the war.

"that is the democrats job...to make sure that the casualties stay in the news."

I agree with Zathras--there weren't many prominent spokesmen against the war in the U.S. Many people had learned a lesson in opposing the first war (Sam Nunn, for one). And Bush still had great approval ratings. And those of us who were momentarily dubious about Afghanistan 2-3 weeks after the start of operations had our doubts resolved and faith in our judgment undermined by the rapid collapse of the Taliban.

Good points all, and good points by Zathras. It really comes down to this, though: Most Congressional representatives, regardless of party, are more concerned with getting themselves reelected than with taking a stand that will be vindicated by history.

In a way expecting anything different is pissing in the wind. Humans are very vulnerable to groupthink, and legislative leaders are humans. The GOP has really learned how to exploit this against the Democrats in the last several years, but there's no reason why it couldn't turn around and work in the Dems' favor in the future. In either case, individual parties may be well served by the groupthink, but our nation isn't well-served.

The media's knowledge of public opinion manipulation is very sophisticated.

there weren't many prominent spokesmen against the war in the U.S.

There were many prominent Americans speaking out against the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but conservative moderates, moderates and many liberals refused to listen to them. Most of those prominent Americans who were against the invasion have been marginalized by the constituency that would benefit the most from their knowlegde. Even after five years of disaster in Iraq, these prominent Americans are still considered too radical to be admitted into the sphere of very serious people because they will not advocate for non-deffensive military acions.

This is also a pretty limited window. I think you'd need to also look at the Sunday roundtables and cable news to get a better picture of who was talking back then.

At the time, I was still living in Tennessee, and being represented by the very conservative congressman Jimmy Duncan. He opposed the invasion of Iraq (and some supplemental spending bills) on the grounds that there wasn't sufficient evidence to support a wasteful foreign entanglement. That's old school "conservative" thinking, and I wish we had a hell of a lot more of it.

Instead, we get candidates threatening to obliterate countries with our vast nuclear arsenal just to show how big their...uh... well you know. As if anyone needed reminding what the U.S. is capable of militarily.

Threats and saber rattling are a sure sign of weakness. Kudos to Jimmy Duncan and others like him who did not give a rat's ass what anyone else thought about their Iraq vote. Hell, Ron Paul's latest ad makes the point more forcefully than Obama ever has.

Blood, treasure and international goodwill are being thrown into the bottomless pit that is Iraq. The sooner we plug that hole, the better.,

History is rife with examples of might empires undone by such "foreign entanglements"

Making counter-factual statements like that should be grounds for removal of tenure. Those guys should be ashamed.

SecularAnimist said better what I immediately thought: How much "digging" would have been necessary to find anti-war citizens when you had hundreds of thousands of people marching against the war? I doubt the New York Times would have had to walk more than two or three blocks to interview a few of the protesters.

The news media also failed to adequately cover anti-war demonstrations that took place across the country prior to the invasion. I attended anti-war rallies in Texas and the local media greatly understated the size of the crowds and notable people who were present. The local paper carried a front page picture of one rally--it featured a ragged group waving a banner which said 'young anarchists'. My daughter was attending college in D.C. that semester and said that there were large anti-war demonstrations almost every week that never made the news. The liberal media is a Limbaugh myth; the unbiased media is a myth; the corporate media is a reality. Long live the ministry of propaganda.

Maybe if there had been more anti-war voices prior to the war, K. Drum might have changed his mind about the war sooner, thereby adding another moderate (and moderately influential) dissenting voice when it might have mattered.

Just to be sure we're on the same page here, Kevin, you are acknowledging that you and your fellow "progressive" bloggers ALSO shut out the antiwar voices and called us crazies too, right?

The press has been nothing but propaganda since they installed surrogates from the pentagon at all the major MSM outlets after the gulf war.
It was Peter Arnett's story "Operation Tailwind" that got these so called advisor's installed.

"Foreigners. Yep. Despite the fact that plenty of Democratic politicians and U.S. experts opposed the war, the news networks almost completely shut off domestic sources of criticism"

What absolute bullcrap. You're confusing (1) Democrats who NOW, belatedly, have discovered how completely and totally, you-bet, opposed they were ALL ALONG to this war and how they totally knew it was going to end in tears, with (2) Democrats who actually opposed the war. It's not the same thing.

And, no, it's not normal for opinion newscasts to spend a lot of time reporting on what Greg Packer-type "man in the street" guys think. They look for politicians, etc. And Democratic politicians WERE interviewed in 2002-03 - I remember it well. They just did not say they were opposed (mostly they were muddle-headed).

Equal Opportunity Cynic,

In either case, individual parties may be well served by the groupthink, but our nation isn't well-served.

I think the psychological term for groupthink is authoritarian follower. We all have bits of the trait but the right wingers have a double and triple dose of it. The trait is enhanced during times of fear. Bush used that trait alright, he used the Hell out of it. Historians in the future will look back and laugh at the irrational things we did as a result of the millennium. The in the years after 3000 they will do irrational things again.

I spoke out against the war and was called a traitor. My daughter marched and was cussed at, saw obscene gestures, and was repeatedly told "get a job!"

"Get a job." That right there sums up the power of corporations in our society. The jobless and dissenters are all lumped into the "loser" category. "Shut up and work" is the motto of our times.

Regardless of this useless survey, the Truth was out there for anyone who cared to find. You only had to read the back pages of the Washington Post to find out that the aluminum tubes were hooey, that there were no drones that could drop bombs even on Europe much less make it to the US of A, that Saddam Hussein had offered to leave for $2 billion, and that the inspectors found no sign of WMD in Iraq. Etc., etc.

Knight Ridder did an excellent job during the run up, and I saw Hans Blix on the News Hour on PBS.

True, if you only read the headlines or Judy Miller you might have gotten fooled.

But are half the Democrats really in favor of electing someone who didn't even take the time to read the National Intelligence Estimate before voting on giving the Little Idiot the authority to go to war?

This isn't a problem with the MSM. This is a problem with the lack of interest in thinking and reading all up and down spectrum of Americans.

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