Truespeak

The Washington Post is re-thinking it's war coverage.

Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

But he ran into resistance from the paper's editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, "helped sell the story," Pincus recalled. "Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper." Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.

"We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder," Woodward said in an interview. "We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier" than widely believed. "Those are exactly the kind of statements that should be published on the front page."

As violence continues in postwar Iraq and U.S. forces have yet to discover any WMDs, some critics say the media, including The Washington Post, failed the country by not reporting more skeptically on President Bush's contentions during the run-up to war.

An examination of the paper's coverage, and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page. Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence for stories that questioned the administration's evidence complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters, were unenthusiastic about such pieces. The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.

"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "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?"

I think this article, much like the New York Times article from May 26, 2004, critical of their own pre-war reporting, accomplishes a couple of things. First of all, this puts a huge dent in the theory of a "liberal media." If these articles prove anything, it's that the media is NOT liberal. Just because a newspaper prints something negative about a conservative, it does not make them liberal. (Although, if they don't print the negative stuff, they can somehow call themselves "Fair and Balanced.") Throughout the entire Monica Lewinsky scandal, I can not recall President Clinton whining about the "conservative media." The media prints the negative stuff as well as the positive. It's what we call reporting. In this case however, it looks as if the media was actually helping the President.

I also think this article lends credence to all the Michael Moores, Al Frankens, and a myriad of bloggers out there that have been criticizing the media for blindly following the President. I believe Michael Moore called it "cheerleading." They simply weren't willing to ask the questions that needed to be asked. Our government likes to talk about accountability, especially in education, but nobody in the media was willing to hold them accountable. They slavishly reprinted the lies to avoid being labeled liberal or unpatriotic while knowing full well that the intelligence was shaky. Any high school journalism student can tell you that that is just sloppy reporting. They should all be ashamed of themselves.

I think the Washington Post and the New York Times are on the right track by issuing these apologies, but now they have to do the hard part and actually make the change. One of the things that has kept this President afloat so long is the media's willingness to blindly go along with whatever he says. If the media were to finally leave him, I believe the general public would soon follow.