Yeah, but that isn’t entirely their fault. It was a scam Dick Cheney pulled, made more credible by Colin Powell selling out and presenting false evidence to the UN.
But basically, Cheney would have one of his staff “leak” information to a national paper, like the New York Times, saying something like, “Intelligence sources say Iraq has yellow cake uranium” or whatever.
Then, when Cheney was in front of the media or UN making the case for invading Iraq, he would cite that article as proof that Iraq had WMDs.
That’s not to say it isn’t also the fault of mainstream media. They all jumped onboard. And had they exercised any kind of journalistic rigor, they would have realized how flimsy the evidence was.
Part of the mainstream media’s enthusiasm for invading Iraq was also due to the conflation of patriotism with wanting to invade Iraq. If you go back to the old War Room threads, you will see this conflation demonstrated quite a bit. Anyone who didn’t want to invade Iraq was considered unpatriotic. And that was a national phenomenon. In fact, it’s the definition of nationalism, not patriotism. But the mainstream outlets didn’t want to be accused of not being onboard with this post 9/11 nationalism. It was like a club. And it was considered the American thing to do - to be part of the post 9/11 nationalism club.