Boehlert's Hindsight

After reading Boehlert's article "Lapdogs", one would be quick to criticize the media and view Boehlert as the savior of the people. His opening paragraphs alone paint a picture of the media that makes them look weak and useless:

"It's unlikely viewers expected "an argument" that night in the East Room. But what about simply asking pointed questions and firmly requesting a direct response? On March 6, even that was beyond the media's grasp. The entire press conference performance was a farce -- the staging, the seating, the questions, the order, and the answers. Nothing about it was real or truly informative. It was, nonetheless, unintentionally revealing. Not revealing about the war, Bush's rationale, or about the bloody, sustained conflict that was about to be unleashed inside Iraq. Reporters helped shed virtually no light on those key issues. Instead, the calculated kabuki press conference, stage-managed by the White House employing the nation's most elite reporters as high-profile extras, did reveal what viewers needed to know about the mind-set of the MSM on the eve of war."

However, his presentation of the weakness of the media was not written until May 4, 2006, over 2 years after this press conference mentioned above. It seems odd, that it would take Boehlert over 2 years to realize that the media had not done their job in challenging the war in Iraq. While one could argue that perhaps he had been a critic of the war all along, his previous articles in Salon suggest otherwise. One of the first articles by Boehlert after the beginning of combat operations in Iraq was an interview with John Voll, a professor of Islamic History at Georgetown. The question posed by Boehlert, as well as the answer given by Voll cast doubt that Boehlert was a real critic of the war when it began:

I'm interested in the "what-if" scenario: What if Saddam were taken out early in the battle? Could his regime survive?
One of the keys is the degree to which the Iraqi military high command is in fact unified, or if the only thing that keeps them together is a live Saddam. If so, then everything collapses. But if the high command is unified, they don't have to admit that Saddam Hussein is dead. Because there are all these Saddam Hussein doubles around. They can drag out one or other of these doubles.

In other words there was not a fear that Saddam wasn't that dangerous, or didn't lack WMD's but rather that his regime was so powerful that it would continue even after his death. There was no refutation whatsoever of Voll's point by Boehlert. While later in the article Voll points out that Saddam's would unlikely be able to survive the war, the possibility exists. There is no discussion of a regime that is weak and free of WMD's.

Another article by Boehlert features an interview with Ronald Bee, a senior analyst at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation in San Diego and Boehler asked him:

The war was not unfolding like a lot of people expected, or how a lot of people were told it might. Have you been surprised the way things have gone?
Not really. Because in any war you have your theory and you have your practice.

This means that the fact that the war played our differently than people expected (i.e. how the media presented it) was not really any big deal. Boehlert does not refute this in any way. There is no comment from him that suggested that people expected the war to go differently because of the media, he is interviewing someone that believes that's just the way things go in war; sometimes you are right, sometimes you are wrong.

These articles are written after combat operations began in Iraq and nearly 3 weeks after the media debacle on March 6 that Boehlert discusses in his "Lapdogs"article. What causes Boehlert to realize 2 years later that media conference was the farce that he describes? I would attribute it to the change in perception of the War. Months went on, the regime fell, major combat operations ended and still no WMD's. It is not until July 16, that Boehlert begins to bring forward the idea that the "intelligence" used to support the war was mostly created by a personal spy ring of Rumsfeld. This is 2 months after major combat operations had ended, yet our soldiers were still dying. I think that this article became the turning point for Boehlert. He seemed to be a supporter of the war, and "cheered on the president" as well as the media up until this article was published. Then suddenly he became a critic of the media's coverage of the war, leading up to the publishing of his book "Lapdogs" (from which the Lapdog piece was excerpted). I think that the evidence presented here is clear that only in hindsight was Boehlert able to make the argument that he did. He was no critic of the media until almost 4 months after the press conference took place, and only later on did he realize their failure.