This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

Five years, half a trillion dollars, the deaths of more than 4,000 Americans and many times more Iraqis later, we are still feeling a kind of shock and all.

Though perhaps not the kind intended by the Pentagon when it rained bombs on Baghdad on March 19th, 2003.

Then we did feel that kind of awe, especially we in the media like Wolf Blitzer.

I think it's fair to say in the 30 years that I've been covering these kinds of stories, General Shepard,

I've never seen anything like this

of this kind of magnitude on live television, maybe not even on not live television. This week,

the crew here at OTM combed through our voluminous coverage of the coverage of the Iraq War

and found that our archive runneth over with examples of media manipulation, credulity, and courage.

In the end, we managed to assemble a show of highlights to illuminate where we've been and perhaps where we ought to go.

At least we ought to pay attention, and that's getting harder.

TV news watcher Andrew Tyndall says that in the last 15 weeks of 2007,

the networks collectively spent just four minutes per week on the war.

But let's start at the beginning, shock and awe.

When the bombs fell, the media were, to put it crudely, stoked,

and they showed it with escalating

displays of patriotism.

Cable news had the martial music and the flagpins and the news anchors who saw the Iraqi

street through rose-colored glasses when American soldiers trudged in.

Bosware has been the focus of a lot of attention, and there were concerns that a humanitarian

disaster could be provoked.

...