Here are a selection of press-focused retrospectives, plucked from the flurry of today’s Iraq war look-backs.
Editor and Publisher makes the point that while most newspapers failed to adequately question key Bush assertions on the news pages, many editorial sections dissented.
Greg Mitchell, E&P’s editor in chief, has just released “So Wrong for So Long,” a book compiling his columns hectoring the press’s failures on Iraq. This week he’s discussing the book—with Jay Rosen, Spencer Ackerman, and others—at Talking Points Memo. (And here’s Mitchell’s list of 18 embarrassing Iraq media moments.)
The New York Times’s Baghdad Bureau blog has a collection of posts looking back at the beginning of the war and discussing the paper’s in-country coverage.
McClatchy’s “Inside Iraq” blog offers something similar. But at its main site, McClatchy offers first person audio-reminiscences by its Iraqi staff.
And this is as good as a time as any to suggest a second look at “Into the Abyss,” our National Magazine Award-nominated November/December 2006 issue. CJR interviewed 47 journalists who had worked in Iraq on what it was like to do their job and how the country had changed with the ebbs, flows, and torrents of battle. The issue has since been expanded into a widely-praised book, “Reporting Iraq.”
UPDATE: This package of video and interviews from the Committee to Protect Journalists is also worth a look.
Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.