This reminds me a bit of the way the US used the pretext of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait to invade Iraq last century. Likewise, the US inflated the death figure to a ridiculous number (and even used a paid actress to describe a fictional atrocity). The media could be having a field day with the ironic comparisons of US and Russian military bellicosity and propaganda. I would add that the invasion of Iraq in 2003--just the invasion mind you, not the occupation--is estimated to have killed close to 8,000 Iraqis according to Iraq Body Count. No country to date has suggested that the US be invaded and occupied as a result.

Glenn,

In response to a previous poster you suggest that the media were as subserviant to the Clinton administration as they have been to the Bush administration. I do not agree with you. Recall the press's response to two early Clinton initiatives: The don't ask, don't tell policy in the military and Hillary's health care plan. In neither case did the media play lapdog to Clinton... I'm not saying whether they were fair or unfair, just that they were free with criticisms. I don't believe they would have been so critical of Bush. In large part, these two issues got the Clinton administration off to a rocky start from which it never really recovered.

Additionally, you don't necessarily have to compare administrations here. You can see the way the media treated Al Gore during the 2000 campaign -- if they treat the candidate that way, why wouldn't they treat the president?

and too many people are relying on the (understandibly) hysterical reports from the civilians on the ground who are, in turn, relying on and reporting from the "grapevine" which tends to vastly inflate casualties (since every "witness" account tends to multiply rather than simply confirm) since most are reporting incidents and casualties that have already been reported by someone else.

I'm not sure there are any neutral observers. The "official" type people who might know are on one side of ther other and either don't know and/or have no access or aren't talking till they have better info and/or have their own superiors to keep happy ...

Using such big weapons in the vicinity of civilians is unconscionable regardless.

I know you hate the press, Glenn. But don't you see even a tad bit of irony in citing a press-bias criticism from the former leader of the Soviet Union?

I covered Gorbachev's historic visit to the U.S., which was a brilliantly orchestrated P.R. event. They set new standards for press coddling, right down to the free Russian-language Monopoly games they handed out to reporters.

You're right: There are a lot of bad reporters. If they're rubbing elbows with their sources, their editors/publishers/ bosses are doing a bad job too.

There are a lot of good reporters too. Like it or not, you're one of them.

The coverage of healthcare was positively awful. Led by TNR under Andrew Sullivan, the press relentlessly lied about the Clinton healthcare plan. A good primer on the misinformation spread by the media on the healthcare plan is this James Fallows' piece. The entire narrative that has grown up around the Clinton healthcare plan and its failure is simply untrue (like most of our press narratives).

Does this pattern of spreading right-wing crap sound familiar? From the Fallows piece:

Much of the problem for the plan seemed, at least in Washington, to come not even from mandatory alliances but from an article by Elizabeth McCaughey, then of the Manhattan Institute, published in The New Republic last February. The article's working premise was that McCaughey, with no ax to grind and no preconceptions about health care, sat down for a careful reading of the whole Clinton bill. Appalled at the hidden provisions she found, she felt it her duty to warn people about what the bill might mean. The title of her article was "No Exit," and the message was that Bill and Hillary Clinton had proposed a system that would lock people in to government-run care. "The law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better," McCaughey wrote in the first paragraph. "The doctor can be paid only by the plan, not by you."

George Will immediately picked up this warning, writing in Newsweek that "it would be illegal for doctors to accept money directly from patients, and there would be 15-year jail terms for people driven to bribery for care they feel they need but the government does not deem 'necessary.'" The "doctors in jail" concept soon turned up on talk shows and was echoed for the rest of the year.

These claims, McCaughey's and Will's, were simply false. McCaughey's pose of impartiality was undermined by her campaign as the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of New York soon after her article was published. I was less impressed with her scholarly precision after I compared her article with the text of the Clinton bill. Her shocked claim that coverage would be available only for "necessary" and "appropriate" treatment suggested that she had not looked at any of today's insurance policies. In claiming that the bill would make it impossible to go outside the health plan or pay doctors on one's own, she had apparently skipped past practically the first provision of the bill (Sec. 1003), which said,

"Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1) An individual from purchasing any health care services."

It didn't matter. The White House issued a point-by-point rebuttal, which The New Republic did not run. Instead it published a long piece by McCaughey attacking the White House statement. The idea of health policemen stuck.

So did the idea that one seventh of the national economy would be transformed overnight. Of the vast American commerce in health care, more than 40 percent is already paid for by the federal government, mainly through Medicare. Under the Clinton plan the rest of the money would still go through most of the insurance companies, HMOs, doctors, hospitals, and laboratories that are receiving it now.

So, let's see, a GOP operative lies about the most basic facts of a progressive piece of legislation and does so in a "liberal" magazine (thanks Andy Sullivan and Marty Peretz!). Those lies get picked up by the pundits and distributed through bigger publications. Where they become the "facts" that everyone knows.

Healthcare reform was the heart of Clinton's first term domestic agenda. It was one of the most progressive things Clinton tried to do and would've saved thousands of lives had it passed. It was a direct assault on the insurance and healthcare industry. And the press helped kill it. (Which is not to say other people, including the Clintons, didn't make mistakes, only that the press repeatedly lied about it and there's a special ring in hell for those who deliberately lied about it.)