Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
Today the Center for Public Integrity released “The War Card,” a voluminous searchable database tallying false statements from the Bush Administration as they built their case to invade Iraq.
The CPI, a non-profit investigative outfit (founder Charles Lewis had smart things to say about non-profit journalism in CJR’s Sep/Oct issue), looked at the words of eight officials and found 935 false claims.
As 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton notes in a video released alongside the project, it isn’t just the administration that’s tarred 935 times over; it’s much of the press, who—with admirable, but too few, exceptions–reprinted the claims without skepticism.
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
