Quote Originally Posted by Cannoneer No. 4 View Post
[INDENT][I]....What hostile media gets out in print hours or days after the event becomes the narrative that stands for decades until disinterested, objective historians analyze declassified information and publish what really happened for the benefit of the small audience who still cares after such a long time.
Agree with the responses to your post that Shek, Norfolk, Ken White, et al have made about the myth of the media loosing the Vietnam War. I think the Parmaters article already mentioned provides a pretty compelling case by a professional and relatively unbiased historian that the Media was not to blame.

Moreover with regards to your point about today and the influence the media has on establishing the narrative i think you are correct in this statement. The media, especially print media when it comes to the later writing of history, are one of the first ones to "document" events which become the stuff of history and help build an early narrative of an issue.

However, in the case of Iraq today, and this goes contrary to what the legions of neo-cons write, I think the print media has done a pretty good job at reporting the war in Iraq. Especially over the past few months major papers like the NY Times, WaPost, and others have really tried not to overly report the violence in place of good things happening there.

What has been most interesting to me about reporting on the Iraq War is how pundits--like those happy travelers from AEI--have become almost like actual newspaper reporters. Other pundits like Trudy Rubin from the Philly Enquirer have also had their opeds started to be treated like traditional newspaper reporting. And in this regard the cumulative effect of traditional and pundit reporting has been a largely positive reporting of the war. In fact one can make the argument that the media has been glossing over some important factors that tend to look less positively on the lowered violence in Iraq and what brought it about.

So if you are trying to build an early case for a blame-the-media argument for Iraq I do not think that you have history or contemporary reporting by the media on your side.

gian