Great PBS piece on pre-war press "coverage"

Check out this piece from this week's edition of Frontline.

It seems like a world long, long ago when there wasn't a War in Iraq. Also, with 20/20 hindsight, it seems unfortunate, sad and an outrage that the press not only didn't do its job adequately, it scarcely did its job at all during the run up to war.

The next time you hear someone say (or maybe even you believe) that the New York Times is a liberal paper, think back to or even look up the stories that Judith Miller's penned leading up to the war. (The Times later ran a mea culpa of sorts, and while it didn't name Miller by name, most of the stories that editorial discussed were written or co-written by Miller.)

From my chair, the press has been out to lunch since September 11 until sometime last year, when it began to wake up to the fact that the War in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. It's about time that some leading media outlets are starting to play the role that The Fourth Estate was originally intended - that of governmental watchdog.

It's about time.

Even Bob Woodward, the stereotypical hungry reporter who was previously thought to not care where a story took him no matter what wrote two tomes early in the Bush Presidency that were nauseating suck-ups: Plan of Attack and Bush at War. At least he made up for it with State of Denial, Bush at War, Part III.

But, the coverage is changing.

Better late than never.