Pressing Issues: How to Pass Your 'Lie Detector' Test

By: Greg Mitchell Editors and reporters now under attack for failing to expose the inaccuracy of official claims during the run-up to the Iraq war often offer this defense: We were being spun (or lied to) by Iraqi defectors on the one hand, and by administration officials on the other. What were we to do? On March 17, legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee offered the perfect retort.

"The best journalists," he said, "are the best lie detectors... Not

just the relentless skeptics who sort of automatically disbelieve everything. But the reporters who instinctively are alert to the possibility that their sources don't know what they are talking about ... are leaving out vital details that would tend to discredit their stories, or they are deliberately lying."

While too many of their colleagues were suffering from A.D.D. (alert deficit disorder),an investigative team from Knight Ridder's Washington bureau has produced one damning report after another, from the summer of 2002 to mid-March 2004. Space prevents a full accounting here, so you are urged to visit www.krwashington. com for the stellar lineup, or check E&P online tributes (most recently on March 4 andMarch 16 ). Two KR reporters, Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel, contributed to most of these stories, with others also playing key roles.

But because reporters often get too much credit ? and blame ? for coverage, particularly in this area, I decided to talk to the two KR editors in Washington most responsible for directing this operation: Clark Hoyt, the Washington editor, and John Walcott, the bureau chief.

Hoyt is a Knight Ridder lifer, with 36 years in, starting at the Detroit Free Press. He shared a Pulitzer for national reporting (with Robert Boyd) for nabbing one of the most famous scoops in the annals of American political campaigns: that Senator Thomas Eagleton, just chosen to be George McGovern's running mate in the 1972 presidential race, had undergone shock therapy many years earlier. Later Hoyt served as KR Washington news editor and as corporate vice president/news.

Under Hoyt's command, Knight Ridder had more journalists in the Iraq war zone than any outlet except The Associated Press. But back home, even months before the war, Hoyt had observed that "by and large, coverage of the war mainly amplified the official line." His bureau's coverage, he explains, "did not start from an antiwar position but from questioning the case made for a pre-emptive war. As we began exploring we found a lot more division and doubt within the government than top officials, and much of the press, were expressing.Now we feel we owe it to every single member of the military killed or wounded, their families, and the public at large, to keep exploring how and why this war happened, until the full story is out there." Knight Ridder, he says, felt a special responsibility, since it (unlike, say, The New York Times Co. and Tribune Co.) fields so many papers in military towns. As KR's own Joe Galloway once put it, "war ought to be the hardest thing a country can do."

Unlike Hoyt, John Walcott has been with Knight Ridder only a few years, since 1997, after stints as a reporter and editor specializing in foreign and diplomatic coverage at U.S. News and World Report, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek.Besides editing, he has co-authored some of the Knight Ridder pieces. Walcott explains that the bureau's skepticism about the case for war was sparked after checking "every single claim" made by the administration about Saddam's links to al-Qaeda and finding they simply "didn't make sense." From that, "one question led to another," he recalls.

But there's another reason KR was so "alert" (as Ben Bradlee would phrase it) when some of the other national news outlets were not. "Our sources," Walcott says, "include a large number of people at the working level in government, not on the cocktail circuit. These unglamorous people ? they could be called the 'blue- collar' type ? actually handled intelligence and saw it different than officials."

There's a lesson in all this: Top sources are good but alert sources, like alert reporters, are best.