Media Admits Failing Public on Iraq War Coverage
March 30, 2004
A year into what has become a very grim occupation, a chorus of senior
journalists are now saying that the mainstream media “failed the American
public” with its uncritical acceptance of the administration’s dubious claims
about the need to invade Iraq.
“This has been the most shameful era of American media. The media has been
sucker-punched completely by this administration,” Robert Scheer of the Los
Angeles Times said recently about how the mainstream media had covered the
U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Sheer, a visiting professor at
University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, made his
comments on March 18 during a conference about the media’s role in the war in
Iraq.
Berkeley’s school of journalism co-sponsored the three-day Media at War
conference. The conference brought together dozens of international
correspondents, journalists, editors, and directors of mainstream media
outlets. Key personalities in the run-up to the war, such as Hans Blix, the
former chief U.N. weapons inspector, and Joseph C. Wilson, the former U.S.
ambassador to Iraq, also participated in the conference.
INFORMATION WARFARE
Speaking for the military, Lt. Col. Richard Long, former Public Information
Director for the U.S. Marine Corps, spoke about why the military had decided to
embed journalists with military units in the field. “Frankly, our job is to win
the war,” Long said. “Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to
attempt to dominate the information environment.”
Long, as head of media relations for the Marine Corps, managed the media boot
camp in Quantico, Virginia, where more than 700 journalists were prepared for
their war assignments. “Overall,” Long said, “we were very happy with the
outcome.”
Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, said,
“Embeddedness has a built-in swerve toward propaganda…because an embedded
reporter is on a team.” Because his life depends on the soldiers with whom he is
embedded, Gitlin said the journalist’s desire to write negative stories is
“quite diminished.”
John Burns, the New York Times bureau chief, called in from Baghdad, where
images and reports of the grim reality of the occupation are filtered before
being published. Burns said: “We failed the American public by being
insufficiently critical about elements of the administration’s plan to go to
war.”
Maher Abdallah Ahmad of the Arab television network Al Jazeera said, “The
Americans still do not know what is happening in Iraq. Does anyone here know
how many Iraqis were killed in the war?” Ahmad asked. “You make all these
efforts to establish a democracy, and you don’t give a damn how many people were
killed?”
Federico Rampini, U.S. correspondent for Italy’s La Republica newspaper said he
was amazed that American journalists have not investigated more deeply Vice
President Dick Cheney’s role in the Halliburton scandal. In Italy, Rampini said,
such a story “would have been on the front page for months.”
While the leading U.S. news organizations are now rushing to expose the Bush
administration’s pre-war deceptions on the need to invade Iraq, Michael Massing,
in his article “Now They Tell Us” in the New York Review of Books, wrote: “Where
were you all before the war? Why didn’t we learn more about these deceptions and
concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for
regime change – when, in short, it might have made a difference?”
Massing points out that Judith Miller of the Times wrote several front-page
articles before the war about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
based on faulty information provided by Iraqi defectors of dubious credibility.
In an e-mail to Burns, Miller wrote that Ahmed Chalabi, the indicted bank
embezzler and head of the exile Iraqi National Congress, “has provided most of
the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper.”
“Not until September 29, 2003,” Massing wrote, “did the New York Times get
around to informing readers about the controversy over Chalabi and the defectors
associated with him.” More than 6 months into the war and with no evidence of
the alleged Iraqi WMD anywhere to be found, Douglas Jehl reported that most of
the information provided by Chalabi and his defectors had been judged by the
Defense Intelligence Agency as being “of little or no value.”
“The press was in a good position to educate the public on the administration’s
justifications for war,” Massing wrote, “Yet for the most part, it never did
so. The performance of the Times was especially deficient,” Massing wrote.
“Compared to other major papers, the Times placed more credence in defectors,
expressed less confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters.”
When Massing asked Miller why she had not included more comments in her stories
from experts who contested the assertions made by Iraqi defectors and the White
House, she said: “My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an
independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of the New
York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”
“But even a cub reporter should know that if the government tells her the sky is
blue, it’s her job to check whether it might not be red or gray or black,” Rich
Mercier of the Free Lance–Star of Fredericksburg, Va. wrote on March 28. “And
skepticism must be exercised most strongly when the matter at hand is whether
the nation will go to war.
“By neglecting to fully employ their critical-thinking faculties, Miller and
many of her colleagues in the elite print media not only failed their readers
during the countdown to the Iraq invasion, they failed our democracy,” Mercier
wrote, “And there’s no excusing that failure.”
As a leading opinion-setting newspaper, the Times set a pro-war tone on Iraq
that many other papers followed. Massing concluded that the “pack mentality” is
“one of the most entrenched and disturbing features of American journalism.”