Downie on PBS Again Admits 'Wash Post' Fumbled Pre-war Coverage

By: Greg Mitchell Appearing on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" on Wednesday night, Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. again admitted that he'd made mistakes in directing the newspaper's coverage in the run-up to the Iraq war, but he continued to describe that failure mainly in terms of not putting more skeptical stories on the front page.

At a couple of points, however, he spoke in broader terms than he had in the article exploring the paper's prewar coverage, written by Post reporter Howard Kurtz, published on Aug. 12.

"We took our eye off that particular ball during that particular period," he said, "but I think we've been pretty tough since then." He also said: "We learned something from our failure to understand the problem with the [weapons of mass destruction] reporting."

But he disputed a statement by one of his own reporters that the paper serves as a "mouthpiece" for those in power.

Otherwise, Downie continued to maintain that while he didn't put stories that disputed the prevailing arguments for the war "on the front page often enough," there were good reasons why that happened that had nothing to do with outside pressure or a fear of confronting a then-popular president.

He argued, for example, that "the administration's view ended up on Page One because it was the administration deciding whether or not we were going to go to war" (although that did not explain why there was not enough room on the front page for counter views). Sensing that the war was going to happen, no matter what, the Post covered mainly when this was going to happen, "how is it going to be fought, and are we planning for the occupation?"

Downie also explained that "what goes on inside newsrooms is complicated," and in that same period the paper also had to cover the fallout from 9/11 and the Afghan war, not to mention "the Columbia shuttle disaster."

He also contested a quote in the Kurtz piece from his reporter Karen DeYoung, who said that the paper serves as the "mouthpiece" of whoever sits in the White House. "We have an obligation to report what the president says ... and then we have an obligation to test it and to question whether or not what was said was sound, based on the facts," Downie said. "I don't think that makes us a mouthpiece ... I think most of the time we do a good job on that. There are times when we've not."

Appearing with Downie on the show was media critic Michael Massing, who agreed that the Post has done a terrific job since the war started, but argued that this has been easier to do now that "the president's popularity is down and the war has gone awry." He said the true test of the Post's coverage will be when challenging the White House again becomes "difficult to do."

Massing also called the media's overall performance in the prewar period "one of the most serious institutional failures of the press going back to Vietnam."

An analysis of the Kurtz article appears elsewhere on this Web site in the current "Pressing Issues" column.