UPDATED 1:42 AM: For a few typos and clarifications.
It's a bit like closing the barn door once the horse has gone, but finally, in even clearer terms than The New York Times did in May, a major US newspaper is admitting they dropped the ball in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. From The Washington Post:
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.[...]
In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "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."
Across the country, "the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones," Downie said. "We didn't pay enough attention to the minority."
That excuse (we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing) doesn't paint the whole picture though. Why the paper that toppled Nixon was hesitant about questioning the current White House can be explained in one word: intimidation.
[Post national security reporter Dana Priest] noted, however, that skeptical stories usually triggered hate mail "questioning your patriotism and suggesting that you somehow be delivered into the hands of the terrorists."
But it wasn't just intimidation directed at the reporters. The sources too were afraid to speak up:
On Sept. 19, 2002, reporter Joby Warrick described a report "by independent experts who question whether thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes recently sought by Iraq were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program," as the administration was contending. The story ran on Page A18.Warrick said he was "going out on a limb. . . . I was struck by the people I talked to -- some on the record, others who couldn't be -- who were saying pretty persistently that these tubes were in no way suitable for uranium enrichment. On the other side were these CIA guys who said, 'Look, we know what we're talking about but we can't tell you.' "
Downie said that even in retrospect, the story looks like "a close call." He said the inability of dissenters "to speak up with their names" was a factor in some of his news judgments.
And there was yet another intimidation at work here. The complexity of the issues at hand. In a nation rushing to war, the time and effort nuance requires were pushed aside:
No Post reporter burrowed into the Iraqi WMD story more deeply than Pincus, 71, a staff member for 32 of the last 38 years, whose messy desk is always piled high with committee reports and intelligence files. "The main thing people forget to do is read documents," said Pincus, wielding a yellow highlighter.A white-haired curmudgeon who spent five years covering the Iran-contra scandal and has long been an expert on nuclear weapons, Pincus sometimes had trouble convincing editors of the importance of his incremental, difficult-to-read stories.
His longevity is such that he first met Hans Blix, who was the chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, at a conference in Ghana in 1959.
"The inspectors kept getting fed intelligence by our administration and the British and the French, and kept coming back and saying they couldn't find" the weapons, Pincus said. "I did one of the first interviews with Blix, and like everyone else he thought there would be WMDs. By January and February [of 2003], he was starting to have his own doubts. . . . What nobody talked about was how much had been destroyed," either under U.N. supervision after the Persian Gulf War or during the Clinton administration's 1998 bombing of Iraqi targets.
But while Pincus was ferreting out information "from sources I've used for years," some in the Post newsroom were questioning his work. Editors complained that he was "cryptic," as one put it, and that his hard-to-follow stories had to be heavily rewritten.
Pincus was too cryptic. That's why Blix's doubts were not front-page news. I'll sleep better now.
In mid-March, as the administration was on the verge of invading Iraq, Woodward stepped in to give the stalled Pincus piece about the administration's lack of evidence a push. "We weren't holding it for any political reason or because we were being pressured by the administration," Spayd said, but because such stories were difficult to edit at a time when the national desk was deluged with copy. "People forget how many facets of this story we were chasing . . . the political ramifications . . . military readiness . . . issues around postwar Iraq and how prepared the administration was . . . diplomacy angles . . . and we were pursuing WMD. . . . All those stories were competing for prominence."
After all this better-late-than-never mea culpa-ing, however, the Post gives themselves the ultimate out:
Whether a tougher approach by The Post and other news organizations would have slowed the rush to war is, at best, a matter of conjecture."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," Downie said. "They have the mistaken impression that somehow if the media's coverage had been different, there wouldn't have been a war."
I don't believe the media should have crusaded against the war. I believe they should have checked their fear at the door and done their damn jobs. Easy for me to say, I know.
"...Pincus, 71, a staff member for 32 of the last 38 years...."
Man, I've been reading Pincus, and respecting the hell out of him for more or less 25 years (finally got the publishing company I worked for to get me a WP subscription in the mid-Eighties), and I hadn't realized he'd either been around *that* long, or was that old. Gosh, who can replace him?
Posted by: Gary Farber | August 12, 2004 at 01:52 PM
That's why Blix's doubts were not front-page news.
Blix's doubts were not front-page news? Odd.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | August 12, 2004 at 02:23 PM
"such stories were difficult to edit at a time when the national desk was deluged with copy"
"Complex stories are tough." Boo hoo.
Posted by: carsick | August 12, 2004 at 02:23 PM
I seriously have no idea what I meant by the above, so I'm now going to make something up:
Pincus had previously noted Blix's misgivings, but declined to give equal time to both of Blix's minds on the topic.
There, that wasn't so bad.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | August 12, 2004 at 02:31 PM
"Complex stories are tough." Boo hoo.
At a certain point, we, the consumers of news, need to start demanding our money's worth.
Posted by: Edward | August 12, 2004 at 03:05 PM
Who pays for news? I get it free.
Posted by: stuzzy | August 12, 2004 at 03:35 PM
"At a certain point, we, the consumers of news, need to start demanding our money's worth."
My continuing hope is that blogs like this one and various others (the list grows daily) will keep the pressure up for diligent and investigative reporting by the mainstream press.
At some point folks have to get embarrassed don't they.
Posted by: carsick | August 12, 2004 at 03:43 PM
[["The main thing people forget to do is read documents," said Pincus, wielding a yellow highlighter.]]
Man. That's it in a nutshell. Given the choice between human sources and documents, ALWAYS go with the documents. Current example: The 9/11 Commission talking heads said both Clinton and Bush 43 administrations were equally to blame for 9/11. But go read Chapter 8 of the report -- which, remember, the commission unanimously approved -- and you learn that the truth is actually a bit different.
Posted by: Lex | August 13, 2004 at 01:43 PM
[Post national security reporter Dana Priest] noted, however, that skeptical stories usually triggered hate mail "questioning your patriotism and suggesting that you somehow be delivered into the hands of the terrorists."
Uhh ... this kind of intimidation looks like it would be worth a story by itself. Are the senders of the hate mail organized? If they make threats, are they serious?
Posted by: lightning | August 13, 2004 at 05:19 PM