16 Times The Media Let Trump Falsely Claim He Opposed The Iraq War From The Beginning
Media figures and outlets have repeatedly pushed the myth, or allowed Donald Trump to push the myth, that he opposed the Iraq War from the beginning. There is no evidence to support this claim and February reporting from BuzzFeed News showed Trump voiced support “for invading Iraq” in 2002 and termed it a "tremendous success" after the invasion began.
BuzzFeed: "The Media Keeps Letting Trump Get Away With His Iraq Lie"
BuzzFeed Editor-In-Chief Ben Smith: "Media Can’t Seem To Dispel, Or Even Challenge" The Fiction Of Trump’s Iraq Lie. Smith criticized media outlets who have allowed Trump to falsely claim that he opposed the Iraq War, noting that in February BuzzFeed had uncovered audio of Trump saying before the invasion that he supported it and calling it a "tremendous success" the day after U.S. forces invaded. From his May 3 article:
Donald Trump did not oppose the invasion of Iraq. Further, there’s no evidence that he’s ever been a “dove” — and a great deal that he’s been an impulsive supporter of military intervention around the world.
We know this because BuzzFeed News’ intrepid Andrew Kaczynski unearthed an audio recording of him saying he supported it. You can listen to it above. The audio quality is clear.
In the recording, made on Sept. 11, 2002, when it mattered, Howard Stern asked Trump whether he supported the invasion. His answer: “Yeah, I guess so.” On the war’s first day, he called it a “tremendous success from a military standpoint.”
It was the most recent in a series of belligerent statements about Iraq. In 2000, he opined at length in his book how U.S. airstrikes did nothing to stop Iraq’s WMD programs and said it “is madness not to carry the mission to its conclusion” in the context of a new war. He said many times in the late 1990s and early 2000s that George H.W. Bush should have toppled Saddam during the Gulf War.
Trump’s opinions during that period have all the force and thoughtfulness of a man who isn’t paying much attention and whose opinion doesn’t matter. His support for the war is also totally unambiguous.
And yet, since Kaczynski found the audio recordings, most of the leading American media organizations have either repeated Trump’s lie or allowed him to deliver it unchallenged. [BuzzFeed, 5/3/16]
FactCheck.Org: “There Is No Evidence" Trump "Spoke Against The War Before It Started.” FactCheck.org has reported that it and its fellow fact-checking institutes were unable to confirm that Trump publicly voiced opposition to the Iraq invasion:
There is no evidence that we could find, however, that he spoke against the war before it started, although we did find he expressed early concerns about the cost and direction of the war a few months after it started.
Others have looked, but no one else — including PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact Checker — has been able to find any evidence to support his claims, either. [FactCheck.org, 2/19/16]
Continue in link:
http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/05/05/16-times-media-let-trump-falsely-claim-he-opposed-iraq-war-beginning/210246
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