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They've always been pretty bad about reporting important stories when they are inconvenient to report, but there are so many travesties that could have been avoided in these past few years.
Niger claim--debunked in November 2002 by the IAEA when the documents were revealed to be obvious forgeries. The media wait until after the invasion has been carried out before taking note of this fact, over six months later.
Abu Ghraib prison scandal--despite reports circulating and opportunities for investigative journalism about an extremely important scandal, only after pictures are released at large does the press get into any kind of gear to talk about it. Once forced to pay attention, the media allow the administration to pass it off as a few soldiers, despite ample evidence to the contrary. They also permit officials such as Rumsfeld to get away with dissembling on the word 'torture', when brutal sodomy and child rape are now documented as being part of the torture soldiers have inflicted--that the numbers go far beyond six soldiers and that the responsiblity goes high up the chain of command will never be reported unless it has to be.
WMD intelligence--despite many experts who gave ample evidence that Saddam could NOT have reconstitued his nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs, the media proceeded to treat these experts as pariahs and they were shunned in favor of more cheerleading coverage which simply reported the administration's claims and left it at that. This culminated in an embarrassing press conference where not a single difficult question was asked of the president, and no news network dared to question why the rush to war was necessary, or how solid the case was, until long after the invasion. Parts of the case for war like Colin Powell's presentation or the UK dossier were lauded as air-tight and compelling when Powell's presentation was widely debunked by experts as soon as he had closed his mouth, and sections of the UK dossier were clearly plagiarized from an outdated California student's paper. None of this was reported on with any frequency in the major media until AFTER the invasion was over.
So what do we do to start fixing this mess? What sort of actions should we support?
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