This week, On the Media looks at impeachment, the press and the president: How did the media cover or even create, the crisis in the White House? Then we focus our lens on the media and missile strikes in Iraq.

Did the media prepare the country for impeachment?
Reporter Marianne McCune asks news consumers, media critics Neal Gabler and Steven Brill and historians if the media prepared people for the historic events now happening in Washington.

Five Monica media moments: News highlights of how we got from here to there...

Top journalists discuss: Did the media pay attention to the right things over the past year? ABC Washington correspondent Jackie Judd and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, both major players in the unfolding of the Lewinsky story, discuss with host Brian Lehrer and Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism their roles and responsibility in breaking stories that might have led to the impeachment process. Was their reporting right on point? Or did they deflect attention from the seriousness of an Independent Counsel investigation that some say recklessly has led the country into an impeachment the majority of Americans say they do not want? And what do Judd and Isikoff have to say about charges that their reports though ultimately proven correct were poorly sourced? Did the ends justify the means?

Recently Jackie Judd, Michael Isikoff and Tom Rosenstiel spoke on these issues at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism First Amendment Leaders Breakfast. You can link to that discussion at www.jrn.columbia.edu

Correspondent Lakshmi Singh reports from Washington on how journalists have been covering the story this week. What pressures are they under? How do they gather information? And how are media outlets determining how much coverage to give the impeachment hearings? Singh talks to Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times, Candy Crowley of CNN, Henry Champ of Canadian Broadcasting, and Brian Naylor of NPR.

Commentary: Murdoch watcher Stanley Mieses looks at the particular way Fox News and other Murdoch-owned news outlets report on the major stories of impeachment and military action against Iraq.

Media coverage of the Iraq missile strikes. Scott Shuger, who writes Today's Papers for the on-line magazine Slate, gives his take on the media and the missile strikes in Iraq.

Reporting Vietnam: In December 1968, the story that wouldn't go away was the war in Vietnam. Though peace talks were going on, the war continued. A new 2- volume anthology, Reporting Vietnam, just published by the Library of America, collects many of the most compelling reports of the war. Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Sidney Schanberg and Gloria Emerson, whose writings are included in the anthology, talk with Brian about whether their reporting made a difference in the outcome of the war or in the way journalists do their jobs today.
Gloria Emerson:
"Most of the stories are like ice cubes: they melt. They served a purpose and they weren't made to last forever. They were written under duress, under sometimes horrifying deadlines. You know, they weren't written during literary seminars on a college campus."
Sydney Schanberg:
"I do think the press had a role insofar as it was reporting accurately. People were reading those stories and becoming angrier and more frustrated as they read them because there was no, as they call it, end game."

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