On the edition of Your Call’s Media Roundtable, we discuss coverage of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
In the run-up to the invasion, the majority of the US media went along with the Bush administration’s fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its links to 9/11, but in the months before the US invasion, reporters in Knight Ridder's DC bureau were the only ones questioning of the case for war.
Why did the US media help the Bush administration sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people? What does the coverage then and now say about the role of journalists in distinguishing fact from propaganda? And how did the invasion and occupation of Iraq change Iraqi society, the economy, and politics?
Guests:
Jonathan Landay, US national security correspondent for Reuters and former Pentagon correspondent for Knight Ridder
Adel Iskandar, assistant professor of global communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver
Nabil Salih, independent journalist, photographer and poet
Web Resources:
Reuters: U.S. grapples with forces unleashed by Iraq invasion 20 years later
Foreign Affairs: Why the Press Failed on Iraq
Leftists: Ransacking Iraq
The Washington Post: The Iraq War helped destroy what it meant to be an Iraqi
