Comments on: Yeow! Knoller Feels Readers' Wrath

[hcoppola]

Mr. Knoller,
To begin with your challenge is disingenuous at best. To suggest that anyone was called on during the March 6th press conference who was not already on Mr. Bush's scripted list flies in the face of the truth.

Putting aside the fact that no one would be called upon to ask a question for which the President was not already prepared, the questions that were asked that night were not the actual problem with the press corps coverage of the lead-up to the invasion. They were but a symptom of the disease that has crippled the national media.

As Mr. Moyers pointed out real questions were being asked, primarily by the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau. Unfortunately these questions were not asked by the media at large, and certainly never directly posed to Mr. Bush, nor would they have been allowed as such.

All of that aside I would have asked:

Mr. Bush why do you continue to allege a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda when there is no factual basis to support your allegation? All independent experts in the field agree that such a connection is ludicrous. Why do you choose to lie to the American public?

As a journalist I could then have presented Mr. Bush's refusal to answer my question with the facts that support it. An error that was committed by nearly all Washington reporters.

[genardo-2009]

My question:
In a 1/17/2003 article for the International Herald Tribune Joost Hiltermann wrote this about the regarding the March 1988 chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja, "Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, show (1) that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja, and (2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq, accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame." If Mr. Hilterman is correct that US State Dept. attempted to protect Saddam from being accussed of responsibility for the deaths of over 6,000 Kurdish civilians, how can we be certain that the case Colin Powell recently made to the UN was not simply part of another propoganda campaign by the US State Department?

[douglain]

Here are my questions:

"Mr. President, on January 27th Hans Blix updated the Security council on the progress of inspections in Iraq. He said, 'Iraq has on the whole cooperated rather well so far with UNMOVIC.' His latest report lists some remaining questions and lists benchmarks for Iraqi compliance, but also indicates that Mr. Blix expects the inspection process to be successful. Why should the US take drastic steps now when the inspection process appears to be working?"

Follow up question:
"In February Colin Powell presented a UK intelligence paper as evidence of the continuing threat from Iraqi WMD. That paper turns out to have been plagiarized from a student thesis that UK officials downloaded off the internet. Was this the best evidence of the threat on offer, and if not why hasn't your administration presented the real evidence?"

And these were questions that I could have asked at the time. I'm not a journalist, but I was following the news closely and knew how thin the evidence for WMDs really was. Your ignorance could only have been willful.

Finally please do respond to me and to everyone as to why you utterly failed to ask relevant questions such as these.

[mcnhome]

Mr. Knoller,

You're entitled to your self-assessment of your job performance during the pre-war period. I totally disagree with you that the White House press corp did much except the repeat the words of the administration. Maybe that's your job. Sounds like a stenographer to me. Moyers is right, IMO.

The question I would have asked Bush during that time if he was so willing so give "diplomacy" a chance why did he have troops poised in the region for six months prior to the war? Bush's idea of diplomacy back then was issuing an ultimatum and then bombing the place when he didn't hear what he wanted.

[gtrman2]

Here's one:

Mr President, in March of 2002, you made the statement:

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."

Since you have obviously abandoned the hunt for the real 9-11 criminal to pursue the PNAC agenda by attacking Iraq, don't you feel the least bit ashamed using the 9-11 tragedy as the "Pearl Harbor like event" the PNAC agenda called for to garner public support for this attack?

[colormeupset]

Of course, these questions also should have been asked:
1. On the off-chance the Judeo-Christian occupying army is NOT "greeted as liberators" by the Arabs, what is your strategy?
2. Our investigation indicates your claims of uranium from Africa (aluminum tubes, mobile weapons labs, reconstituted nuclear weapons, 45-minute delivery systems, etc.) are, um, not true. Your comment?

[awkward pause] Oh yeah, the U.S. corporate media doesn't do its own investigating. Not of Bush-Cheney, anyway. You rely solely on what they tell you. They tell you what to report, and you write it down, just as Stephen Colbert described.

[moyersblog]

Bill Moyers responds to Mark Knoller:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2007/04/bill_moyers_on_the_record.html

[gtrman2]

Here's a good one for you:

Mr President, in March of 2002, 6 months after the 9-11 attacks and your famous "Wanted Dead or Alive" speech, you made the statement "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."

Since you have obviously given up on catching the real culprit of 9-11, don't you find it the least bit shameful to be using the events of 9-11 to advance the PNAC agenda to attack a country who had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11?? Don't you think the people of this nation deserve better than that?

[memekiller]

I do think your question is worth answering seriously, though. I believe at the time, it was fair to ask why, all of the sudden, it was so imperative to attack Iraq, NOW before we finished the job in Afghanistan. Shouldn't we nab Bin Laden first? Create a Democracy here?

At the time, Ambassador Wilson was already being punished for showing the faultiness of some of Bush's evidence, and we have yet to probe who forged the docs and why. The NYTs reported postwar planning was forbidden out of fear it would telegraph the invasion was inevitable. Wesley Clark had testified about the dangers of the war.

I think that's what gets me the most -- the fact that there was no debate on the merits of war. It was your jobs to force a discussion. Instead, Bush called for a "Resolution for Peace" to give Bush leverage in dealing with Hussein, so war could be avoided, then built sent in the military, so Hussein could see we were serious, and war could be avoided. Bush never declared war; he simply told the UN inspectors to get out (and ever since, you've let him claim Hussein didn't let them in), and it was shock and awe. The war simply began, before asking whether we should. And the people who continue to dominate your shows were the ones who have proven the most wrong and still in denial.

[fiver6]

Mr. Knoller,
Do you not understand how disappointing and even disturbing the giggle-fest that passes for a press conference under this president is to many of us. Contrast the pre-war press conference highlighted by Moyers with the questions asked by the British press in any of their limited encounters with Mr. Bush.

Pointing out a small number of "tough" questions asked by your colleagues, and then mentioning that Moyers might not have liked Bush's responses ignores the point that this was a controlled if not scripted event. Bush was free to evade any question without any follow-up or media comment. The reporters, so proud to be big-shots and so disdainful of our intelligence, just laugh with the president. Ha ha, joke's on us.

[terran1212]

"It%u2019s March 6, 2003. Pres Bush is moving closer to ordering an attack on Iraq.

You%u2019re in the East Room for his primetime news conference %u2013 and he calls on you.

What do you ask?

What finely-crafted question do you pose that both serves the public interest and will get a meaningul response?

I assure you my colleagues and I will read what you write."

Ask the questions the BBC asked or Al Jazeera asked or even SKY NEWS (owned by Rupert Murdoch of FOX NEWS) asked.

Here's one for the brilliant elitists in the press corps that supposedly weren't lapdogs that you could've asked:

"Do you have any legitimate proof of Iraq being a threat to us before you order an illegal attack against that country that could kill hundreds of thousands of people?"

What, is that "politically impossible" to ask? Maybe it's HUMANLY IMPOSSIBLE to allow so many people to die because you are cowards.

[memekiller]

I don't blame you guys for the run-up to the war. I blame you for the "willing dupes", to use your term, you played since then, and continue to play to this day. I actually understand how reporters got sucked into the cyclone like everyone else -- but how do you explain continuing to play dumb, after all we've learned?

So here are a few questions for you to answer: Why did your network claim Abramoff was a bipartisan scandal, when every journalist in DC knows he personified DeLay's K Street Project, whose sole purpose was to stop money and jobs from going to Democrats?

Why did you push the Pelosi plane story, without mentioning the Sergeant-at-arms statement declaring that HE ordered the plane for security reasons?

Why did you devote so much time entertaining the accusations of the Swift Boat Veterans, when you knew their accusations were baseless? If it was because you have to report the charges made by the President's campaign, why did you claim this group was unaffiliated with the Bush campaign?

Why did Couric, whose father had Parkinson's, devote time to asking Michael J. Fox the same questions Limbaugh was asking about encouraging his symptoms, when she knew the medication makes this impossible? Why did Elizabeth Edward's cancer bring her character into question, but not Snow's?

Now that I've submitted my questions I'd ask the preznit, I've got one that I'd ask CBS. Why did this study find CBS second only to Fox News in misleading the public during the runup to the war?

http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqMedia_Oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_pr.pdf

[denniscmyers]

There's a couple of issues here. One is the nature of the White House reporter's job as opposed to other reporters who cover Washington. Those reporters who are based in the White House don't have the freedom of movement that other reporters who were on this story have, and as soon as I read the original Knoller response to Moyers I thought he was missing the point of that scene in the documentary. Moyers wasn't going after the WHITE HOUSE reporters, who to a great extent are dependent on the coverage of other reporters. In answer to Knoller's request, there is no question that could have been fashioned AT THE TIME OF THAT NEWS CONFERENCE that would have elicited the needed information because reporters outside the White House had not been doing their jobs. Clearly, given the success of Landay and Strobel at laying out this story, there was information out there to be obtained. If other reporters had been scrutinizing the Bush claims with vigor, the White House reporters would have had a lot more to work with in wording the question that Knoller now wants written in retrospect.

[catatomic99]

Since when is the job of a journalist simply to ask politicians cute questions, and parrot the official answer? Ever heard of research?

Let's put aside the fact that Knight Ridder and the European press were actually reporting information that ran contrary to the Bush Administration's claims, and you could've cited any of it and asked for an explanation.

No matter what question was posed, you needed to RESEARCH the President's response and objectively report on it's veracity, not just act as a P.A. system with an expensive tie.

I think Mr. Knoller is way off base. And is actually being defensive when he says "You be the reporter!" Mr. Knoller many of us are not reporters and to throw this at us?! Shame on you! It is just a manipulative tatic to take blame away from yourselves in the news media! We are not reporters and we rely on people like you to give us objective information- you guys didn't! YOU DID NOT DO YOUR JOB THOROUGHLY!!! I'm appauled by your arrogance and lack of self intuition into the matter.

Are you going to tell us too that if you knew then what you know now, you would have done things differently?! Because I certainly don't but that argument either!

Whether you are a politician or the media- you have a job to do- and your job is to investigate the facts! Our government including the democrats and the media did not!!!

[mattcat25]

The reason for George W. Bush and Richard Cheney to attack and occupy Iraq was to divert US Federal Treasury Funds from (all) the American People and hand out no bid contracts to their pet pork project war profit contractors, and to secure long term oil extraction contracts for the oil companies. This we all know now without a doubt was the motivation and %u201Cvictory%u201D talked about many times by Bush.

The problem here still lies is that the Bush Administration and the supporting GOP (the Republic Party) are still currently spewing the exact same story to the American People. The Congressional Emergency War Spending Bill allows Bush to continue his War Contractor Welfare, gives more equipment needed by our (poorly paid) Troops along with long term health care, and requires a non-binding withdraw timeline.

Bush and the GOP have made $Billions on our troops and they haven%u2019t had enough, it is time for the American People to support the oversight of this WhiteHouse gone MADHOUSE!

[colormeupset]

More questions that might have been helpful had they been put to Bush-Cheney in early 2003:
1. Beyond the scary but vague talk of mushroom clouds, Cheney has flatly asserted (Meet the Press 03/16/03) that Saddam has a "reconstituted nuclear weapon." Do you stand by that claim?
2. Even if your claims about Iraqi WMD and ties to al-Qaeda are true, is it really your considered judgment that invading Iraq now is so urgent that the U.S. must curtail the hunt for bin-Laden?
3. If the U.S. military really can, as you put it, walk and chew gum at the same time, then when might we look forward to the capture of bin-Laden and the terrorists responsible for 9/11?

Finally, a question for you, Mr. Knoller. In the selling of the Iraq Occupation, were American corporate media employees not allowed to practice good journalism, or has the meaning of that phrase simply been forgotten, as with bin-Laden and al-Qaeda?

[one_american]

Al-Qaeda has been waging a propaganda war against America for quite some time now, and is using liberal Americans as their tools to wage this war.

The longer that liberal Americans and the liberal media promote the propaganda of the terrorists, the longer America will be at war, and Americans will continue to die at the hands of terrorists.

It is more than likely that the war in Iraq would already be over if it was not for this truth: Al-Qaeda is trying to "divide and conquer" America.

The only way to end terrorism is for America to unite in the effort to end terrorism.

Call your Democrat Senators and Representative and tell them to quit the political games, and get behind the President, and our Military, and fight terrorism like your life depends on it.

Because it does.

Hm. No HTML. Let's try that again.

I agree with the commenter who said that there's too much to choose from. All you have to do is go through any of the things reported by Knight Ridder and ask if that information is true (and then fact check his reply afterward).

Or ask him about PNAC and whether it's a coincidence that such a large portion of the people advising him were all members and had plans to invade Iraq prior to 9/11:

http://thinkprogress.org/colbert-42806

Or ask if there are better options for containing Saddam other than sending the US military to invade and occupy a country in the middle of the Middle East, because practically the entire international community believed that this was unnecessary--just go back and look at their statements:

href="http://thinkprogress.org/2005/11/13/debunking-the-right-the-world-did-not-see-the-iraqi-threat-as-bush-did/

It seems to me that these are all no-brainers. (You guys own brains, right?)