Categorical Aperitif

See/hear/read Greg Mitchell on today's Democracy Now!, talking about his new book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq. A taste:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the “Iraq Follies,” and you’ve summarized this in a recent piece you did, the eighteen things we’ve already forgotten about the media’s flawed coverage of Iraq.

GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, it’s really going back to the run-up and past the run-up, all the various commentators, like Chris Matthews or Bill O’Reilly or David Brooks and Tom Friedman—people like to poke fun at Tom Friedman for the so-called “Friedman Unit,” where he continually every six months would say, “Let’s give the war another six months,” and that went on for four years. But that was actually—

AMY GOODMAN: Thomas Friedman of the New York Times

GREG MITCHELL: Yeah, Thomas Friedman, yeah. But that was actually sort of a majority position. If you go back—I had to write at Editor & Publisher—and it’s all collected in the book—about every three months, I would write a column saying, “When is the first major newspaper going to come out for a—to reverse course and to begin a pullout?” And every three months, I would write this, and it never happened and never happened, until last year. So the Thomas Friedman situation really was the mainstream view.

Except that, as I pointed out three Friedmans ago, Thomas Friedman didn't invent the Friedman Unit; his equally misguided Times colleague David Brooks did. FAIR traces Friedman's first invocation of the magic six-month interval back to November 30, 2003, but his colleague Brooks said this three weeks earlier, on November 4, 2003:

Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense, the Bush administration is going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror, the crucial turning point where either we will crush the terrorists' spirit or they will crush ours.

I know, I know: that Midway analogy is so glaringly stupid that it distracts the attention from that "over the next six months," so casually tossed in at the beginning. Still, there it sits. David Brooks invented the Friedman Unit. I've suggested renaming it the Brooks Standard Unit or BSU, but I must admit, that doesn't have the euphonious zing of "the Friedman" or "the FU." Anyway.

Amy's conversation with Greg Mitchell is worth a read/view/listen if you'd like a quick refresher course in the many media disgraces that helped to bring us to where we are today. Surely somebody out there needs to induce vomiting?