Archive of Interviews on Run-Up to Iraq War

Happy to hear today from Kent Bye, who interviewed me in 2004 for a film he was creating on how the media helped get us into the Iraq war with its "echo chamber" coverage.  He tells me that the film was never completed but he has posted transcripts of most the interviews, including one with me here.  (And video the interview here.)   He also talked with the stellar Knight Ridder reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, Helen Thomas, Jay Rosen,  Grover Norquist, Amy Goodman, Van Jones, Michael O'Hanlon,  David Sirota, Hugh Hewitt, Steve Rendell, and on and on.  Videos here.  Obviously, a tremendous amount of insight there on what had just happened in the previous two years. 

Kent pulled out for me his exchange with longtime CBS correspondent Bill Plante:

PLANTE: [I]f you take it as a given, as I've already suggested to you that we did, that the administration was hell-bent on going to war, then you could only point out the steps that were being taken down that path. Despite the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction found, and despite the fact that the international community disagreed.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: From my perspective when I look back on it, after the vote was made on November 8th for the second resolution it seemed to be irrelevant whatever the weapons inspectors were reporting.... What would you have changed in looking back on this time period, if anything at all? Would it have been the same?

PLANTE: You're basically asking me to suggest that the news media could have done something in this case, and I don't really think that the way we operate we could have. The news media in the United States are not generally argumentative about the processes of government. They may be skeptical, and generally are, but not argumentative. It's a whole different discussion on how we see our role.

Greg Mitchell’s book So Wrong For So Long, on the media and the Iraq war, was published last week in an expanded edition for the first time as an e-book.