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Comment by lern_too_spel | Hacker News Reader

Except for Fox News, which breathlessly covered every new possible chemical weapons facility that the US captured, mainstream media pretty quickly concluded that there was no extant chemical weapons program in Iraq after the US entered. Russian media is still pretending that Ukraine is the aggressor, and there is no war.

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I was alive and watching the news back then, and this is bullshit. NYT didn't admit their screw-up until over a year after the war began. [0] I'm not sure CNN ever admitted it. Even worse, every time the previous ridiculous theory of war was exposed as nonsense, they were eager to transfer to the next ridiculous theory: WMDs, Saddam supposedly harboring aQ, fostering democracy, saving the Shiites, saving the women, saving the Kurds, saving the Yazidis, the surge, opposing MaS, opposing ISIS, opposing Iran, opposing corruption, stealing their oil, etc, blah, blah, blah.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...

I was alive and watching the news, and you're completely wrong about TV news and the NY Times reporting, which freely admitted that Iraq didn't have a chemical weapons program (except for Fox News, which kept reporting that this time we found it without ever reporting that the last time wasn't what they suggested). The only thing that took a while was the apology for believing Bush administration sources in the run-up to the war.

The simple way to show that anyone on TV (besides e.g. "Democracy Now") got it right by a particular date would be to link to a recording or transcript of an example.

Simple. Every single news agency said as much. Here's one from two months after Baghdad was captured. http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/06/09/wmd.controversy/in...

Here's the NY Times less than a month into the invasion noting that no active chemical weapons program had been found and that the administration's words seemed to be shifting about whether they believed it would ever be found: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/05/world/a-nation-at-war-ill...

Meanwhile, those who watched Fox News were never told that the earlier finds were not ongoing chemical weapons programs: https://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/poll-republicans-wmds...

Still waiting for the war crimes tribunal for the American military + Bush and friends.

There isn't going to be one for Russia either. That doesn't mean that the news media in the US is tightly controlled government propaganda or that the news media in Russia isn't.

> There isn't going to be one for Russia either.

I'm not so sure about this. What makes you believe so?

War crimes tribunals only happen for the loser after they submit to terms.

What makes you believe Russia will not end up losing?

Russia has far more resources than Ukraine, which has no interest in chasing the Russian army into Moscow and getting them to surrender anyway.

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