Brit Hume: Media Stopped Covering Iraq Because it Was Seen as ‘Bush’s War’
Media Buzz host Howard Kurtz asked Fox News political analyst Brit Hume why the media turned its attention away from Iraq until its rapid disintegration into violence last week. Hume’s theory: it was seen as George W Bush’s war, and largely went out of the public eye when he did.
“This was a war that was thought to be George Bush’s war, and it was also thought to have been concluded, even though we were still in the process of withdrawing,” Hume said. “The story looked in the eyes of a lot of people to be over…So the decision was made to bail out of there. All hell was breaking loose in other parts of the Middle East, and Iraq looked relatively stable.”
Hume added that the perception that the Iraq war was a failure led to a reluctance to commit U.S. troops to other conflicts, which in turn depressed coverage of those conflicts.
“In the view of most people now, Iraq, even though it appeared to have been concluded successfully by the time Bush left office, came to be viewed in the aftermath, not the least because the president kept acting that way, as a failure,” Hume said. “[So] how to cover the civil war in Syria? Very difficult. Extremely dangerous. There’s no host government there to make sure the media are taken care of.”
Watch the clip below, via Fox News:
[Image via screengrab]
