Thursday, August 12, 2004

Belated Admission from the Washington Post   Stories pushed aside in march to war Post says it underplayed skeptical reports on WMDs By Howard Kurtz WASHINGTON - 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. By now, mea culpas about press coverage leading up to the Iraq don't win special points for transparency and credibility. Tell us something we don't know. Anyone involved with protests back in September/October 2002 knows that media coverage often belitted and underplayed the anti-war movement. Even some of the conservative students in my fall 2002 News Criticism class were surprised at what they discovered when the class did a content analysis of ongoing coverage of the debate over war with Iraq. Nevertheless, it is good for the public record to have publications owning up to their lapses, though note that the ending quote in the piece takes back much of what the article argues:   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." Leads me to wonder whether these confessions will make much difference the next time U.S. leaders start pushing us to war. 10:52:27 AM     comment []

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