Iraq Waterloo for U.S. Media

The Consortium For Independent Journalism has this report

For more than three decades, the U.S. news media has been living off – or living down, depending on your perspective – its Watergate-era reputation of helping to unseat a power-abusing President and exposing a raft of other political scandals.

But the U.S. media’s debacle over Iraq – failing to seriously question George W. Bush’s case for invasion and often acting as pro-war cheerleaders as the casualty lists lengthened – has dealt a death blow to that 30-year-old mythology. The bloody spectacle of Iraq has become the Waterloo of Washington’s “Watergate press corps,” its crushing defeat.

Even the nation’s preeminent news outlets, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, were sucked into the fiasco, shattering the trust that many Americans had placed in their “free press” as a vital check and balance on Executive power.