Jeff Cohen worked in the belly of the beast as a panelist/commentator over the years at all three cable news channels.
He founded FAIR, the New York-based media watch group. He's also been a nationally-syndicated columnist and was the communications director of the Kucinich for President campaign. Major cred.
Here is his speech made at ILCA (Intl. Labor Communications Assoc.) workshop in Washington, D.C., Nov. 12, 2004.
Viewers of Fox News, where I worked for years, were the most misled. But strong majorities of CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN viewers were also confused on at least one of these points. Among those informed on all 3 questions, only 23 percent supported Bush's war.
How can you have a meaningful election in a country where, according to polls, half or more of the American people don't know who attacked us on 9/11? They think Saddam Hussein was involved.
To help Bush mislead Americans, Fox News Channel required that the banner "War on Terror" run when Iraq was discussed.
(more excerpts below, but you gotta read the whole article)
I was at MSNBC when Tom Ridge was holding a news conference at Homeland Security in late 2002 about alleged new terror threats from Al Qaeda -- and MSNBC ran a lower third: "Showdown with Saddam."
At MSNBC, I was asked to debate Frank Gaffney, the former Reagan official who seems to live on TV, in a segment based on Gaffney's claim that not only was Saddam Hussein behind 9/11, he was also behind Tim McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing! I'm not kidding.
Last month, PIPA released a new study that found majorities of Bush supporters, sometimes huge majorities, not only had major misunderstandings of the basic facts about Iraq, but they were misled on all sorts of other Bush positions. 74 percent of Bush supporters believed that Bush favors inclusion of labor and environmental standards in trade agreements.