CNN's Kyra Phillips: Reid's "War Is Lost" Comment Is "Discouraging" To Troops
April 21, 2007 -- 1:53 PM EST // //
Matthew Yglesias rightly chastises the media for failing to ask whether Harry Reid is substantively right or wrong in his assertion that the war is "lost." But perhaps we should be careful what we wish for.
Here, for instance, is CNN's Kyra Phillips explaining in a surprisingly cutting way that Reid is in fact wrong. How does she know this? One key reason: General Petraeus told her so -- yes, the same General Petraeus who was handpicked by the White House largely because he was willing to utter optimistic noises about the current strategy's prospects for success. Take a look:
Note that Phillips manages to pack three whopping GOP talking points into less than three minutes of TV:
(1) We can't make the overall judgment that we're losing the war because little bits of progress are being made in isolated pockets ( if this is the metric, how can we ever make an overall judgment that we've failed?);
(2) Democrats have no concern for what military commanders say;
And worst of all...
(3) Reid's statement was "discouraging" to the troops (it's unclear how Phillips knows this, of course).
Look, given CNN's abysmal coverage of the bogus Pelosi-to-Syria story, you'd think CNN would be trying a little harder this time to avoid complete capitulation to the White House/GOP spin on this story. But the network appears prepared to blow this one, too. In addition to Phillips, the Lou Dobbs show also let a battery of administration apologists unload the most fanciful of GOP talking points at Reid -- that Reid was appealing to the "antiwar left" and that Reid was saying flat out that Al Qaeda had won. No Dems were allowed to rebut these charges. And needless to say, the show didn't bother pointing out that Reid's opinion is not a marginal one at all, given the current state of public opinion, or that the Al Qaeda attack line completely removes from the equation the fact that there's a civil war going on in Iraq.
Anybody else find this coverage to be appallingly weak and irresponsible?
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