Home > Fears Impacted U.S. Reporting on Iraq
Associated Press
Fears Impacted U.S. Reporting on Iraq
By Mielikki Org - Associated Press Writer
BERKELEY, Ca.
Competitive pressures and a fear of appearing
unpatriotic discouraged journalists from doing more
critical reporting during the run-up to the invasion of
Iraq, according to reporters and others at a conference
on media coverage of the war.
The journalists on the panels at the University of
California at Berkeley this week blamed the Bush
administration for leaking faulty information, but said
the media also has itself to blame for not being more
skeptical about the case for war.
"The press did not do their job," said Michael Massing,
who wrote an article in the New York Review of Books
that found The New York Times and The Washington Post
particularly at fault.
Journalists fear they will be seen as unpatriotic if
they challenge White House statements, said Robert
Sheer, a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
"There is no doubt that there is an atmosphere of fear
in the media of being out of sync with the punitive
government," Sheer said.
Much of the criticism focused on a Sept. 8, 2002, New
York Times article by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon,
which said Iraq was importing aluminum tubes that could
be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium, a critical
step in making an atomic bomb.
Massing said nuclear experts or weapons inspectors would
have refuted the evidence had the Times consulted them.
Experts later verified the tubes were not used for
nuclear weapons, but The New York Times and other papers
buried that news in their inside pages, he said.
Massing noted that a phrase from the article _ "The
first sign of a smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud" _
made it into President Bush’s State of the Union address
last year, as well as speeches by national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin
Powell to justify the war.
A call to the Times for comment was not immediately
returned on Friday.
John Burns, the Times’ bureau chief in Baghdad, speaking
by satellite phone from Iraq, said American reporters
are doing a good job of covering the war’s aftermath.
In fact, reporters accused of being insufficiently
critical are going too far in the other direction when
they suggest Iraq is already descending into chaos and
civil war, Burns said. He called it "a growing deception
among the press and others that there is an air of error
and disillusion" in Iraq.
The only government representative at the conference
that ran Tuesday through Thursday was Lt. Col. Rick
Long, a Marine Corps spokesman. He deflected accusations
that the Pentagon decision to embed about 700
journalists with troops fighting in the Iraq war allowed
the government to influence their coverage.
"The reason we embedded so many journalists is that we
wanted to dominate the information environment," Long
said. "We wanted to beat any kind of disinformation or
propaganda by beating them at their own game."
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press.