count said:
The Times and The Post are independent Media organizations with independent reporters gathering their information free from government control.
No US media organization gathers information in Iraq independent of US government influence and management.
As far as "control" - not to bog down in definitions of how much influence amounts to "control" of some kind, we note the extraordinary ability of the US military and executive administration to plant stories that receive national distribution, and frame the vocabulary and circumstances of media accounts -
we recall one such event discussed on this forum just a few weeks ago, when a couple of "respectable" "journalists" who presented administration PR as results of investigative reporting (that had not in fact been accomplished) were featured nationwide in all major media, described exactly as the PR setup required they be described (former "staunch critics" of the war effort and the Surge, just back from a stint of serious and independent nvestigative reporting in Iraq) in defiance of the plain facts -
and we note the extreme difficulty of obtaining reliable and independent information from much of Iraq, or any of the military forces there.
count said:
Someone had evidence the mission of major combat operations (IE the war) wasn't accomplished? Please, provide a link, because I'd love to read it. The major combat was over. Period.
The "mission" was not to end major combat - not at that time, anyway. Several disrespectable writers offered that as a revision of the "mission" (we win? great, let's leave now), but were dismissed then by the serious and respectable herd of patriotic media. Too bad, eh?
But even that meagre redefinition of "mission accomplished" was doubted at the time, by a great many pundits and such - I recall Molly Ivins for instance, a mere desk jockey columnist with no special expertise, predicted (just before launch) that the initial invasion as would be an easy military success, followed by "the peace from hell".
count said:
It was frequently described, for example, by comparing it with the pageantry and pomp involved in Big Lie presentations of 1930s Germany. ”
Sorry, I don't read publications that would make such an inane remark.
That must be how you end up saying things like this
count said:
What's made Bush's PR stunt seem ridiculous is the fact a Civil War erupted after the regime was toppled. I don't see how any media organization could have reported what had not happened yet.
Quite a few media figures found W's PR stunt not only ridiculous (and disturbing) but obviously premature, at the moment it was performed - the idea that it only came to seem ridiculous months later is either evidence of extremely narrow and biased news sources or another one of your remarkably consistent memory revisions.
The similarity of style and content between W&Co's pageantry and that of the fascist political parties in Europe in the 1930s is striking - not inane at all.