Report: Dissenting View on WMD Coverage at 'NY Times'

By: E&P Staff A lengthy report by Gabriel Sherman in this week's New York Observer offers several revelations, and criticism from unnamed sources, concerning that crucial period at The New York Times in 2002 when the newspaper advanced flawed information about WMD in Iraq.

As the piece points out, Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., speaking on the Charley Rose Show this month, described this as the ?overheated period that followed 9/11,? adding, ?I think it's fair to say that those stories would not have run in The New York Times today.?

Much of the Sherman article looks at dissension within the Times, principally on the part of Washington reporter James Risen, at around the time Judith Miller was writing her badly mistaken pre-war articles about WMD starting in September 2002.

?Several current and former Times staffers recalled Mr. Risen's complaints about his time at the Washington bureau,? Sherman writes. ?His intelligence sources were telling him that Ms. Miller's sources were wrong about the presence of W.M.D. in Iraq. One person who was in the bureau at the time recalled that Mr. Risen said that his intelligence sources were saying the administration's W.M.D. intelligence was 'political.'

?Two of the sources recalled Mr. Risen saying his efforts to get the bureau to question the paper's W.M.D. reports were rebuffed. The same two recall Mr. Risen complaining that he was having trouble getting his more skeptical line of reporting onto the page.?

Sherman adds: ?When The Observer called to check out the story, Mr. Risen said accounts of his frustrations were 'inaccurate' and offered no further comment.? But Risen did write several articles for the paper that took issue with some of Miller's information. As E&P has noted, these stories tended to appear inside the paper while Miller's ran on Page One.

The article can be found online at www.observer.com/media_offtherecord.asp.

The Observer also features a cover story this week looking at the overall state of media coverage of Iraq, entitled "While We Were Sleeping." It notes cutbacks at Baghdad bureaus and restrictions on reporters and photographers among other reasons the war is not getting as much coverage as it deserves.