Pundits Say Public Is Wrong About Iraq

Pundits Say Public Is Wrong About Iraq: "Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
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Media Advisory

Pundits Say Public Is Wrong About Iraq
For media elite, why U.S. went to war is a meaningless debate

11/30/05

With polls showing growing opposition to the Iraq War and an increasing distrust for the White House, one might think that the press corps would be willing to re-examine how the threat from Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction was used to lead the country into war. But for many pundits, the origins of the Iraq War are old news.

As the Washington Post's David Broder argued on NBC's Meet the Press (11/27/05), there's no point in raising such questions: 'This whole debate about whether there was just a mistake or misrepresentation or so on is, I think, from the public point of view largely irrelevant. The public's moved past that. The public wants to know what we're going to do next in Iraq.' (The 44 percent of the public that wants to see a withdrawal from Iraq, according to a October 30-November 2 ABC-Washington Post poll, is out of luck, however; Broder added that Rep. John Murtha's advocacy of withdrawing U.S. troops 'certainly crystalized the debate about the possibility of an immediate withdrawal, but that was very quickly rejected.')

When Sen. John Kerry accused Vice President Dick Cheney of mak"