That is how former White House press secretary Scott McLellan characterized the White House press corps with respects to selling the Iraq War to the American people.

From a May 28 posting at ABC News' Political Punch blog:

"... Through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it… the media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding. Was the president winning or losing the argument? How were Democrats responding? What were the electoral implications? What did the polls say? And the truth--about the actual nature of the threat posed by Saddam, the right way to confront it, and the possible risks of military conflict--would get largely left behind…"

McClellan writes that while he thinks most reporters are personally liberal, the "vast majority--including those in the White House press corps--are honest, fair-minded and professional" when it comes to letting their political biases impact their coverage.

"If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should have never come as such a surprise. The public should have been made much more aware, before the fact, of the uncertainties, doubts, and caveats that underlay the intelligence about the regime of Saddam hussein. The administration did little to convey those nuances to the people, the press should have picked up the slack but largely failed to do so because their focus was elsewhere--on covering the march to war, instead of the necessity of war.

"In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

The posting also offered this tidbit from McLellan on how television news could improve:

"The network that can find a way to shift from excessively covering controversy, the conventional horse race and image-driven coverage to give a greater emphasis to who is right and who is wrong, who is telling the truth and who is not, and the larger truths about our society and our world might achieve some amazing results in our fast-changing media environment."

McLellan's observations are more confirmatory than revelatory.

I haven't read the book, but the Washington bureau of McLatchy Newspapers is generally credited with having done a good job of trying to cut through the Bush White House's spin on Iraq. However, its newspapers aren't in influential markets, and so they didn't help set the agenda.

The NYT's coverage in the lead-up to the war was a disaster, leading to the grovelling editors note on WMD coverage.

Then executive editor Howell Raines, after getting burned on one badly reported story in 2002, decided he "wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn't editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs," wrote Seth Mnookin in the book Hard News.

As a result, splashy-but-wrong stories by the notorious Judith Miller got big play, while critical stories about White House claims on WMDs and links to al Qaeda got buried.

I remember watching this catastrophe unfold, and thinking the only way the Bush administration wants this to end is with a war.

But I think in those post-9/11 days, the U.S. media's critical faculties may have been clouded. As one fellow said in the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11, "You can make people do anything when they're scared."

The Bushies saw 9/11 as an opportunity, and they used it to push their wider geopolitical agenda. The media, for whatever reason, largely chose to wimp out (with some honourable exceptions). The rest is history.