The mainstream media’s self-serving revisionism about the Iraq War.

Good article from the ever-provocative Matt Taibbi here.

Quote:

The first rule of modern commercial media is you’re allowed to screw up, in concert. There’s no risk in being wrong within a prevailing narrative. That’s why the chief offenders kept perches or failed up. The job isn’t about getting facts right, it’s about getting narratives right, and being willing to eat errors discovered in service of pushing the right subtext. Failure to self-audit after Iraq led the media business to mangle of a series of subsequent stories. From the still-misreported financial crisis of 2008 to the failure to take the rise of Donald Trump as an electoral phenomenon seriously to the increasingly sloppy coverage of our hyper-aggressive foreign policies, we’ve gotten very loose with facts and data, knowing there’s no downside to certain kinds of misses.

Quote:

The damage this story did to our collective reputations is still poorly understood in the business. In fact, “Why do they hate us?” stories are one of an increasing number of feature ideas we routinely botch. We’ll never get rid of the scarlet letter from those years until we face how bad it was, and it was so much worse than we’re admitting, even now.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politic...taibbi-812230/

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