Michael Massing describes the American press coverage of the war in Iraq as "the unseen war," an ironic reference given the number of reporters in Iraq and in Doha, Qatar, the location of the Coalition Media Center with its $250,000 stage set. He argues that a combination of self-censorship, lack of real information given by the military at briefings, boosterism, and a small number of reporters familiar with Iraq and fluent in Arabic deprived the American public of reliable information while the war was going on. <BR>Massing also is highly critical of American press coverage of the Bush administration's case for war prior to the invasion of Iraq: <BR>US journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the administration. Those with dissenting views--and there were more than a few--were shut out. Reflecting this, the coverage was highly deferential to the White House. This was especially apparent on the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction .... Despite abundant evidence of the administration's brazen misuse of intelligence in this matter, the press repeatedly let officials get away with it. <BR>Once Iraq was occupied and no WMDs were found, the press was quick to report on the flaws of pre-war intelligence. But as Massing's detailed analysis demonstrates, pre-war journalism was also deeply flawed, as too many reporters failed to independently evaluate administration claims about Saddam's weapons programs or the inspection process. The press's postwar "feistiness" stands in sharp contrast to its "submissiveness" and "meekness" before the war--when it might have made a difference.

Orville Schell wrote the preface to Massing's articles reprinted from the New York Review of Books. Massing is a MacArthur Fellow who writes frequently on the press and foreign affairs. His articles are titled: The Unseen War (May 29, 2003) and Now They Tell Us (Feb.26, 2004). The epilogue is an updated article originally published June 24, 2004, titled Unfit to Print?
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Over 500 reporters were embedded with military units to produce news coverage of the war in Iraq for American media outlets. As Michael Massing explains, this did nothing to prevent the coverage from being dependent on sources sympathetic to the White House. The embedded journalists saw only a small part of the war, while their colleagues back home refused to report on the ample evidence showing the pre-emptive war to be misrepresented by the Bush administration. Meanwhile, reporters at the Coalition Media Center were afraid to challenge the information (or more accurately the non-information) they received at the military's press briefings because of the threat of not being called on in the future. The result was American coverage of the war that seemed to show "a war of liberation without victims." Since the end of the war, however, it has been a different story. The media as a group has begun to ask difficult questions about the evidence on which the war was based and on how that evidence was used. Massing highlights how the "contrast between the press's feistiness since the end of the war and its meekness before it" points to entrenched and disturbing features of American journalism.