Deep Blade Journal

CBS’s Mark Knoller takes on Moyers’s “Buying the War” and gets pummeled in return

We have not yet seen Bill Moyer’s devastating documentary on the cooperation of mainstream media with the Bush Administration in developing public consent for the Iraq invasion because our PBS station here in Maine had its annual auction last week. NOTE TO MAINE READERS: It will air THIS WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, at 9pm on channels 10 & 13.

Still I want to point out that there is a very interesting mainstream media response to the Moyers piece from CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller. Knoller attempted to criticize the Moyers piece HERE, on the basis of how Moyers treated an important March 6, 2003 Bush press conference. Knoller wrote last week,

He shows only a single, brief example of a question – deep in the news conference – in which a reporter asked Mr. Bush to reflect on how he was guided by his faith at that difficult time. Admittedly, it was a softball.

But Moyers did not cite any of the other much more pointed questions put to the President that evening in the East Room.

Now, I took quite an interest in this, having posted recently about that very press conference on its 4th anniversary. Before citing the dozens of times the president was allowed to give his stock answer at this crucial pre-war event, “If he [Saddam Hussein] doesn’t disarm, we’ll disarm him,” I wrote,

The president’s gibberish–”I hope we don’t have to go to war, but if we go to war,” and “I’ve not made up our mind about military action. Hopefully, this can be done peacefully,” and “We hope we don’t go to war; but if we should, we will present a supplemental [budget].”–should have been transparent at that point. For the most part, the sheepish press corps was more interested in Mr. Bush’s “faith.”

It is also striking how almost nobody in the room seemed at all interested in the president’s long-term plan for Iraq, and what the costs of a lengthy occupation might be. Only that question about Vietnam even raised the issue about going down a long, destructive path. Of course if the attack had been presented as leading to a lengthy occupation possibly costing thousands of American lives, which at the time even this administration certainly could have expected, support for it would have been much lower.

Needless to say, I do not think much of Knoller’s point about “pointed questions.” Now, there is a whole lot of attack on Knoller in the public comment section for his piece, which I thank CBS for even having. I posted twice in there. The first (now down on page 15) as follows:

If these WH Press Corps questions on March 6, 2003 were so probing, how is it that President Bush was able to give exactly the same answer every time? (eg., “If he doesn’t disarm, we’ll disarm him.”) It was like the WHPC served him, cooperatively, these “doubts” that made a whole lot of the world’s citizens rightfully very angry just so he could bat them away with his stock answer.

I remember almost punching the TV that night, you guys came off so weak.

It is also striking how almost nobody in the room seemed at all interested in the president’s long-term plan for Iraq, and what the costs of a lengthy occupation might be. Only that question about Vietnam even raised the issue about going down a long, destructive path. Of course if the attack had been presented as leading to a lengthy occupation possibly costing thousands of American lives, which at the time even this administration certainly could have expected, domestic support for it would have been much closer to the level in the rest of the world–LOW.
Posted by owl0426 at 07:17 PM : Apr 26, 2007

Yesterday, I noted that Knoller had posted an update, obviously stunned by the content of the hundreds of comments he received. He threw down a challenge for commenters to put themselves into the reporters’ position on March 6, 2003 and to come up with a “finely-crafted question…that both serves the public interest and will get a meaningful response.”

Here’s what I wrote,

I respect Mark Knoller’s challenge here. But I also think one additional, overriding criterion for the questions beyond “serves the public interest” and “meaningful response” needs to be added: “will not harm the correspondent’s access or attract unwanted flak from the White House or bosses”.

Here is something that could have be asked, but probably would have run afoul of that third, unspoken criterion:

In the March 3 issue of Newsweek, John Barry reports that “Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in the summer of 1995 that after the gulf war, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.”

You and Secretary Powell both have cited Kamel as a credible source. Does this not undermine totally your present case that Iraq must now be “disarmed”?

Posted by owl0426 at 01:27 AM : Apr 30, 2007

If the press corps had pressed on this, they might have pumped the Barry story up to the level it deserved, and brought the rest of the then-voluminous available information contrary to Bush’s case for war out into the light. As it turns out, Barry was 100% correct. There was no threat in Iraq that had to be “disarmed,” as the UNMOVIC mission without a doubt eventually would have been able to certify. Iraq had in fact not lied in its declaration under UN Security Council Resolution 1441. The US invasion was pure and simple a war of aggression–a taking of Iraq.

While they did serve up a few, mild, non-detailed critiques of the WMD case chielfly so Bush could slap them down, the sheep in the press corps failed to press Bush on his stock answer, and failed to vigorously pursue any stories about how the president’s “views were challenged or disputed by others.”

The world could have been spared the utter disaster that is now Iraq if members of this elite press corps had taken their jobs seriously.