'Washington Post' Says Iraq Coverage Was Flawed

By: Greg Mitchell First The New York Times, now The Washington Post has confessed to fumbling the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the run-up to war. The Times handled it through an editors' note in May, then a mea culpa editorial last month. The Post, which has been widely hailed for its post-war coverage, bared its mistakes today in a lengthy front page story written by media critic Howard Kurtz.

Kurtz quotes Bob Woodward, the paper's assistant managing editor: "We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder. We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier" than widely believed. "Those are exactly the kind of statements that should be published on the front page."

Why return to this subject? Kurtz points out that with violence still raging in Iraq many accuse the media of failing the country by not reporting with more skepticism the Bush administration's case during the months before the war.

Kurtz summarizes his findings this way: "An examination of the paper's coverage, and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that the Post (Click for QuikCap) published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page. Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence for stories that questioned the administration's evidence complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters, were unenthusiastic about such pieces. The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times."

Then he quotes the paper's Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks: "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

According to Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr.: "We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part." Across the country, "the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones. We didn't pay enough attention to the minority."

Woodward, commenting on the finding of the Sept. 11 commission of a "groupthink" among intelligence officials: "I think I was part of the groupthink."

Still, Downie rejects claims from many that tougher media coverage might have prevented the war. These critics, he says, "have the mistaken impression that somehow if the media's coverage had been different, there wouldn't have been a war."

A number of critics have faulted the American news media for not being more skeptical about the Bush administration's claims before the beginning of the war in March 2003. In the year and a half since Saddam was toppled, U.S. troops have yet to discover any weapons of mass destruction.

In a study published in March by the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, researchers wrote: "If the White House acted like a WMD story was important, ... so too did the media. If the White House ignored a story (or an angle on a story), the media were likely to as well."

In May, The New York Times criticized its own reporting on Iraq, saying it found "a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been" and acknowledging it sometimes "fell for misinformation" from exile Iraqi sources.