Fox News covered the debate over NBC’s grand “civil war” pronouncement in a segment on Special Report tonight that included a statement from Fox News VP John Moody:
MOODY STATEMENT: Some are using the term [civil war] to indicate failure, not inside Iraq, but of U.S. policy in Iraq. We’re unwilling to fall into that tender trap. We’re not using the term because there are non-Iraqis in the fray, and that makes it something different.
I think the last statement misses the real reason why NBC News has made the wrong call here. The presence of foreign jihadis is just one of many reasons why people can disagree over whether Iraq has descended into a state of full-blown civil war. NBC News chose to make, as CBS Evening News producer Rome Hartman put it, a “political statement”