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A...pimple. Half a million people died as an immediate result of the Iraq war and a brutal terrorist group rose from the ashes of that "mess" to murder and sexually enslave 1000s more. The outrageous privilege of this statement by Taibbi boggles the mind.https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1109596533668884480 …
I don’t think that’s what Matt meant here. After reading the article it was clearer.
I read the piece. I’m not discounting the errors and embarrassments he cites, but the comparison and the framing just doesn’t work. It’s not the same thing, Russiagate is certainly not “WMD times a million” and it’s insensitive to pretend it is.
It’s mostly the framing and language, Shaun. Yes he has one line about how destructive the Iraq war was but the meat of the story just seems to (rather gleefully) equate some perhaps embarrassing factual inaccuracies by his colleagues with the shame of cheering on a horrific war.
I’ve seen too many journalists, even ones who cover these conflicts, care more about how they make them look than the people who suffer from them, but using one of this scale and destruction to prop up a screed of triumphant finger-pointing seems incredibly self-serving.
P.S. For the record, I have a lot of respect for much of Matt’s work and did not go into reading that piece with the intention of shutting him down. I was surprised and disappointed by what I read. Maybe I should have been more measured in my critique but I think my point stands.
The scale of RussiaGate error is more like the editorial mistakes surrounding Hillary’s email server than the scandalous journalism leading up to the Iraq invasion
Now that is a good analogy, although perhaps not as convenient in this context.
Matt makes good points in the article about the media’s role in moving the goal posts. But: 1) the journalistic story can’t be disconnected than the stakes, which Matt ignores. 2) Russiagate, many journalists wanted story to be true. WMD, it *was* a conspiracy from White Housepic.twitter.com/9IBCsyr7Ws
I get that “X is the Y of our generation” is a great literary device but by being cavalier (or actually completely blind) about the impact of the media story + ignoring the origin of the problem, Matt both atones the media a bit actually and makes light of the harms of war.
I wasn’t in journalism circa WMDgate. I was an Israeli teenager going to school w/ a gas mask because they thought Saddam Hussein would strike Israel w/ chemical weapons as retaliation. But I have sympathy to *some* journalists of that time.
At the end of the day, when members of the intelligence community say that there is solid classified evidence that Iraq has WMDs, that’s really hard to vet w/o a whistleblower. Same w/ NSA surveillance. That’s not the dynamics of information in Russiagate though. Not at all.
It’s a really bad piece because it leads with the awful comparison, and does so before the report and underlying evidence is revealed and looked at by Congress. Press failures with Iraq literally led to massive deaths and casualties. To compare this to that is really gross.
First off, we don't know what's in the Mueller report yet. We don't know the entire story- The news media missed this story during the campaign, which doesn't bother dear matt at all, and now that they're on it he finds them to be almost criminally wrong. That's pretty strange.
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