Iraq and The Times. An example of media abetting misinformation

31 May 2004 - In the run-up to the war, the Bush administration was making urgent and dire claims about Iraq possessing chemical and biological weapons. Vice President Dick Cheney warned publicly on Aug. 26, 2002, that Iraq would have nuclear weapons "fairly soon." And lawmakers, as U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson told an audience at Daytona Beach Community College last week, were being told in secret briefings by the administration that Saddam planned to attack U.S. cities with chemical and biological weapons on unmanned drone airplanes.

None of those claims has proven true. Some of the claims turned out to be gross and purposeful misrepresentations of the facts by the administration in order to sway public opinion in favor of a questionable war. As Nelson revealed on Monday, the administration knew that the information about Iraqi drones carrying WMDs was false when it presented it to lawmakers; Air Force intelligence had examined the matter and dismissed it as nonsensical. Lawmakers weren’t told that part.

The administration’s campaign of disinformation would not have been so successful had it not managed to dupe the media as well. The administration made available to the nation’s leading news organizations sources that would corroborate each others’ claims about the dangers Iraq poses. Normally, news organizations check their sources and verify claims. The most influential news organization in the country, it turns out, failed to apply those standards to some of its most important reporting.

In last Wednesday’s editions of The New York Times, the paper’s editors admit that in its coverage of Iraq before the war and since, "we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been."

The New York Times is among the few news organizations that sets the agenda of news cycles worldwide. In that sense, it wields enormous and disproportionate power to influence public opinion. A government official’s claim about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction made in an online publication or a regional newspaper may or may not have much of an effect beyond that publication’s audience. The same claim published on the front page of The New York Times elevates the issue to national importance and, for good or bad, legitimizes it as fuel for national policy.

For The Times to own up to a pattern of sub-par reporting on such a significant issue makes it news in itself for several reasons. The Times’ coverage helped shape the opinions which, at least in the run-up to war, supported an invasion. Many of the myths that made a war seem necessary were disseminated in The Times — and carried or incorporated in reports by most news organizations, The News-Journal among them. Among those were the claims by Iraqi "dissidents" and "scientists" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, or that al-Qaida and Syria were getting their hands on Iraq’s unconventional weapons. The Times now admits that those dissidents’ credibility was suspect, that scientists had misrepresented themselves, that key sources — especially Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress and a pretender to Iraq’s throne — have proven less than credible.

Yet many of those myths are still the backbone of arguments presented by die-hard supporters of the war today. A belated admission of misjudgment or poor reporting is better than nothing. The stakes being so high and the consequences of such misrepresentations so costly, the editors’ admission may seem both self-serving and too late to matter. Then again, the war and its coverage continue, as do the Bush administration’s remorseless attempts to continue spinning the war its way despite a rash of scandals. The question now is whether The Times and big news organizations will live up to their newfound skepticism regarding Iraq.

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