Last week's mea culpa from The Washington Post about its coverage of the runup to the Iraq war contained an admission of error and pledge to offer balanced reporting. Great, says Corn. But the venerable daily's reluctance to admit its role in shaping public opinion about current events is worrisome. Especially as President Bush continues to mislead America.
David Corn writes the Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).
It is rather unusual for a news media leader to suggest that if the public is better informed the national discourse will not produce different—or better—policy outcomes. But that is what Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post , suggested last week to a reporter for his own newspaper.
Downie’s remark came at the end of a long front-page quasi-mea culpa that concluded that the paper’s prewar coverage of the weapons of mass destruction controversy “in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.” The article, written by Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, whacked the Post for having failed to scrutinize vigorously the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s supposed WMDs and for having relegated articles that did challenge the White House view to inside pages where they would receive less attention and cause little fuss. Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks told Kurtz, “Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff.”
It is commendable the Post allowed Kurtz to do this piece (which touts the under-appreciated efforts of reporter Walter Pincus to investigate the WMD claims of the Bush administration). Downie was forthright in telling Kurtz, “We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration’s rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part.” Assistant managing editor Bob Woodward said, “We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for [the administration’s WMD assertions were] shakier” than the White House maintained.
The piece was fascinating not because it was an admission of error but because it revealed how the people who steer one of the most important media outlets in the United States view their role in the national debate. Reporter Karen DeYoung, a former assistant managing editor, said, “We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power. If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said.” If contrary information appears “in the eighth paragraph,” she added, “where they’re not on the front page, a lot of people don’t read that far.” In his defense, Downie pointed to the paper’s reporting on Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 presentation at the U.N. Security Council. He rightly noted that the paper published several pieces analyzing Powell’s speech—each of which quoted experts who took issue with Powell’s argument—on the inside. (The New York Times did not submit Powell’s appearance to such an examination.) But Downie added, “To pull one of those out on the front page would be making a statement on our own: ‘Aha, he’s wrong about the aluminum tubes.’” And Downie dismissed the consequences of his paper’s negligence: “People who were opposed to the war from the beginning and have been critical of the media’s coverage in the period before the war have this belief that somehow the media should have crusaded against the war. They have the mistaken impression that somehow if the media’s coverage had been different, there wouldn’t have been a war.”
These are all telling comments. DeYoung, who works for the newspaper best known for sinking Nixon’s presidency with its aggressive Watergate coverage, maintained the paper should first and foremost be a conveyor belt for the White House. This is the prevalent view among reporters who cover the administration. First, be a stenographer, then evaluate. But instead of granting Bush plenty of space to claim Saddam Hussein is in cahoots with Al Qaeda before tacking on (and burying) information challenging this assertion, why could the Post not publish a story that begins, “Today President Bush maintained Saddam Hussein was collaborating with Al Qaeda, even though intelligence officials say there is no evidence to substantiate this claim”? Sure, some folks—particularly people at the White House—would view such an article as the Post “making a statement.” But such a news story would be a truthful statement and a more accurate rendition of reality than an article that is a “mouthpiece” for an unfounded assertion. And what would have been wrong with the Post placing on the front page a story that closely examined one aspect of Powell’s UN presentation and included the views of legitimate experts who disputed the secretary’s assertions?
Downie suggests that the Post failed to mount this sort of coverage because it was not sensitive enough to the existence of a minority of war skeptics. But this is not about diversity. The Post—and the rest of the media biggies—should have closely scrutinized all of the administration’s claims in order to fulfill the public service mission they embrace as journalists. The Post, to be fair, did a better job than The New York Times and other papers in examining the White House’s prewar statements. But it severely downplayed many of these articles. One of the best examples—which, surprisingly, Kurtz did not mention—was a news story that appeared on March 18, 2003, the day before the invasion began. It began, “As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this week it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved—by the United Nations, European governments and even U.S. intelligence reports.” The headline was damning: “Bush Clings to Dubious Allegations About Iraq.” Under what definition of news is a president leading a nation to war on the basis of “dubious allegations” not front-page material? This story was smothered on page A13.
Downie would be correct to note that even if his paper had placed this story on the front page with a banner headline it would not have stopped the invasion. After all, the war was already in motion. But if the Post and other media bigfoots had for months prominently reported that Bush was guiding the country to war with false or unproven assertions, might that have made a difference? No one can know. But surely the executive editor of the Post has to believe that what the media reports does—or can—influence the actions of politicians and government officials. Yet he seems unwilling to concede his paper (as well as the Times , the network news shows, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and the others) enabled Bush to misinform—or mislead—the public.
It is important what lessons the Post and other media outlets draw from this episode, for Bush continues to mislead. As he campaigns for re-election, Bush insists that he made no error of bad faith in claiming that Hussein was neck-deep in WMDs. “I thought we were going to find stockpiles; everybody did,” Bush says. But it is not true that “everybody” thought so. Many experts believed otherwise. The Post occasionally quoted them (without highlighting their views). I’ve gone over this terrain in previous articles. But, for example, Rolf Ekeus, the former executive chairman of the UN inspectors, said he doubted there were WMD stockpiles in Iraq. In February 2001—before there was a need to justify a war with Iraq—Powell said Hussein had “not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction.” The documentary Uncovered: The War on Iraq —released as a DVD last year but just about to be distributed in theaters in a longer version—features several analysts with technical or intelligence experience who questioned the WMD case for war in the months before the invasion. The honor roll includes Ray McGovern, David Albright, Mel Goodman, Scott Ritter, Joseph Wilson and Graham Fuller. (See the movie—and interest declared: I appear in it for about seven seconds.)
Before Bush sent American troops to invade Iraq, there was a critical debate over the nature of the threat Hussein posed and whether he actually possessed WMDs that endangered the United States. The Post and its brethren did not sufficiently cover that debate, and, worse, their editors were overly deferential to Bush—even when they had reason to question and investigate fiercely the claims he used to justify a war. How the Post covered this issue mattered greatly at the time. How it deals with its screw-up on this front and how (or whether) it alters its approach to covering Bush (and his continuing efforts to obfuscate) matters as well.
