Gloves Off: Rumsfeld Attacks Press on Iraq Coverage

By: E&P Staff When public support for the Vietnam War sank in the late-1960s, President Nixon, often via his vice president, Spiro Agnew, blamed the "nattering nabobs" in the media (in speeches crafted by William Safire and Patrick Buchanan). Is history about to repeat itself?

On Monday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attacked U.S. news coverage of the Iraq war and accused journalists of rushing to find fault with the military.

"We've arrived at a strange time in this country where the worst about America and our military seems to so quickly be taken as truth by the press, and reported and spread around the world, often with little context and little scrutiny, let alone correction or accountability after the fact," Rumsfeld told an audience at the John Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

He asked: "How will history judge, if it does, the reporting some decades from now when Iraq's path is settled?" He added: "A lie moves around the world at the speed of light," stressing there is a "jarring contrast between what the American people are reading and hearing about Iraq and the views of the Iraqi people."

Ironically, this came in the wake of the military admitting Iraqi newspapers had been paid to publish pro-American news stories, which has drawn wide criticism from military commanders and others. Rumsfeld, however, complained that the issue "has been pounded in the media," but "we don't know what the facts are yet."

Rumsfeld accused news organizations of focusing on the deaths of U.S. troops while offering little context about the cause for which they died. "You couldn't tell the full story of Iwo Jima simply by listing the nearly 26,000 Americans that were casualties in a brief 40 days at Iwo Jima," Rumsfeld said.

"So too, in Iraq, it's appropriate to note not only how many Americans have been killed -- and may God bless them and their families -- but what they died for, or more accurately what they lived for," Rumsfeld said.

"To be responsible, one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks," Rumsfeld said.

The administration has cited figures showing that Iraqi troop strength and training is growing. But in an interview Monday with The Associated Press, Iraqi Vice President Ghazi al-Yawer disputed this, saying the training of Iraqi forces has actually suffered severe setbacks in recent months because some security units are being used to go after political rivals.