Taibbi of NY Press Skewers Kurtz and WP re: apology for Iraq coverage

http://www.nypress.com/17/33/news&columns/MATTTAIBBI.cfm

When the Post wasn't reassuring readers of its competence, it was offering excuses - lots of them. The list is really an extraordinary one. According to Kurtz's interview subjects, the Post was slow on Iraq because: a) Walter Pincus is a "cryptic" writer who isn't "storifyable"; b) there is limited space on the front page, and executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. likes to have health and education and Orioles coverage and other stuff there; c) the paper got a lot of depressing hate mail questioning its patriotism whenever it questioned the Bush administration; d) their intelligence sources wouldn't go on the record, while Bush and Powell were up there openly saying all this stuff; e) the paper had to rely on the administration because Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus had no "alternative sources of information," and particularly couldn't go to Iraq "without getting killed"; f) the paper, including Woodward, was duped by highly seductive intelligence-community "groupthink"; g) too many of the dissenting sources were retired from government or, even worse, not in government at all; h) stories on intelligence are "difficult to edit"; i) there was "a lot of information to digest"; h) the paper is "inevitably a mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power"; j) a flood of copy about the impending invasion kept skeptical coverage out ; and finally,k) none of it matters, because even if the Post had done a more thorough job, there would have been a war anyway.

For God's sake, Bush was up there in the fall of 2002, warning us that unmanned Iraqi drones were going to spray poison gas on the continental United States. The whole thing—the "threat" of Iraqi attack, the link to terrorism, the dire warnings about Saddam's intentions—it was all bullshit on its face, as stupid, irrelevant and transparent as a cheating husband's excuse. And I don't know a single educated person who didn't think so at the time.

The story shouldn't have been, "Are there WMDs?" The story should have been, "Why are they pulling this stunt? And why now?" That was the real mystery. It still is.

he writes great stuff, holds no punches, and does excellent analysis

saw the war in Iraq as the war to make the middle east safe for Israel. They supported the war and went along with the lies about WMD to get what they wanted. End of that story.

The interesting thing now is what the editors and publishers of the NYTs and WP think about Western wars of aggression on the Arabian Pennisula? This one is not working out very well -- growing new Islamic fundamentalist warriors like a field of newly planted wheat, and establishing a new generation of worldwide "anti-semites" who see the evil hand of PNAC and the neo-conservative agenda behind the war in Iraq.

I'll bet they wish they had this to do over again, but it is unclear where they think we should go from here. This bunch of grand thinkers is obviously not ready to abandon the Iraqis to their own devices -- so now what??

I could tell them the way out, and have, but they are not ready to listen, not yet. Too bad -- more people dying every day, and the situation worsening for Israel at an exponential rate.

So say I.

Sad but true.

Steno-Sue is one of those characters you could not invent!

:-)

Just the thought of war had them juicing themselves. Think of all the sensationalistic pieces that could be written and aired on war. Why would they possibly want to ask any real questions that may have made the people question the whole concept? War sells papers. No doubt about that.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/media_lessons.php


Media Lessons


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.

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Media Lessons
David Corn
August 18, 2004


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 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.”


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