Greg Mitchell is an editor of Editor & Publisher, a journal covering the newspaper industry, and whose coverage of the Iraq War has won many awards. In the lead-up to the invasion and in during the occupation of Iraq, Editor & Publisher was one of the sources that were raising critical and important questions about the rush to war, the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the information that the United States government was giving to the media. So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed Us on Iraq collects several of Mitchell's columns from January of 2003 to October of 2007 examining how the media has covered the war and covering stories that have been ignored by the corporate media.
Divided by years and months, Mitchell provides important commentary on many of the key issues of the Iraq War--WMD, the Abu Ghraib scandal, calls for withdrawal, the media's accepting the government line, the failings of Donald Rumsfeld, "the surge," and the human cost of the war. On all of these topics, Mitchell weaves together examples of press coverage with unique analysis to provide insights that are unfortunately rarely found in the corporate media. In his columns, he often takes an issue--for example the third anniversary of the war--and surveys how various newspapers cover it in light of the situation in Iraq. Most often, he finds that the media downplays the most interesting aspects and instead focuses on simply rehashing the government's perspective. Mitchell devotes considerable time to how the media has accepted responsibility for its failings in the lead-up to Iraq. To that end, he writes about The New York Times and The Washington Post and their "apologies," criticizing them both for not accepting enough responsibility and not making substantive changes to their procedures and policies. Perhaps most striking is that there is not more discussion of this topic, due no doubt to the fact that few media outlets ever accepted responsibility for their role in enabling the Iraq War. In addition to the problems with the "reporting" side of the media, Mitchell also examines some of the pundits that advocated for the war and what has happened to them (for example Thomas Friedman) after all of their predictions turned out to be false. Unfortunately, as is the case with the reporters' failures, few pundits have taken responsibility for the consequences of their words.
Mitchell's book is not just a study of media coverage of the war, he also includes several columns that focus attention on stories that were--or still are--ignored by the media. This keeps the writing fresh and also provides an opportunity for readers to gain knowledge about important aspects of the war of which they may have been unaware. These topics include writing on why the media did not publish pictures of US soldiers killed in Iraq, cover the wounded more thoroughly, and suicides among Iraq veterans. These consequences--the human toll of the war--are rarely discussed in the media beyond the death toll of US soldiers, just as the death toll for Iraqis is often ignored.
Like other books such as The Best War Ever and War Made Easy, Mitchell's So Wrong for So Long offers a critical look at the media's complicity creating a climate in which the invasion of Iraq was possible. Mitchell raises several key points about the claims made by US officials and relates information that was widely available at the time and should have been reported by the media. Moreover, while many books on the media and Iraq have criticized the media's coverage in the pre-invasion period, Mitchell's is one of the few to bring this criticism into the present, showing that the corporate media continues to reflect US government's position on Iraq, and perhaps more disturbingly, Iran.
Greg Mitchell, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed Us on Iraq, (Union Square, 2008).
