Mr. Juan Williams of NPR misstates the beginning of the war on terror

[Kolesar]

Mourning Edition needed a boot to the head. I provided it.

Hello Morning Edition Staff,

While reviewing the status of the presidential campaign in Monday morning's broadcast, Juan Williams referred to this week as being the being the one year anniversary of the beginning of the "War on Terror". Mr. Williams would have been correct to refer to this week as the one year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. However, to say that George Bush began to fight the "War on Terror" by using our armed forces to overthrow the regime in Iraq is a gross distortion of facts. This distortion serves to reinforce the erroneous idea held by many Americans that Saddam Hussein's regime was responsible for the Islamic terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11 of 2001.

In a poll of Americans done last year, it was determined that 23% of NPR or PBS listeners had at least one one major misperception about important facts about the war. I think it would be an important project for National Public Radio to produce new programming that would recap the events leading up to invasion of Iraq and correct those major misperceptions. In any case, it does not further the truth for Mr. Williams to be using his broadcast to couple the former Iraqi regime to the horrible events of September 11.

I have attached a link to an article describing the poll results:

http://www.medialifemagazine.com/news2003/oct03/oct06/4_thurs/news2thursday.html

[SCDem]

1. I heard that this morning and was thinking the exact same thing

thanks for writing a letter in.

[trumad]

2. Actually that would be Afghanistan...

It just goes to show you how infected the Media Ho's are with Rove talking points...

[Kolesar]

3. I received an earnest response from my local NPR affiliate

He said he would pass my letter on to NPR Morning Edition. I left the writer's name off of his response. Here it is:

Thanks for you comments about Juan Williams’ war on terrorism reference this morning, and your suggestions for NPR’s overall coverage. You should know that we’ve passed them along to Morning Edition’s producer in Washington. I believe you are correct in that the “war on terrorism” language emerged in a speech by President Bush right after September 11th ,2001.

Thanks for keeping us on our toes.