- Those were the days when I longed
for ABC-TV's great Sam Donaldson to back up my questions as he always did,
and I did the same for him and other daring reporters. Then I realized
that the old pros, reporters whom I had known in the past, many of them
around during World War II and later the Vietnam War, reporters who had
some historical perspective on government deception and folly, were not
around anymore...
-
-
- Of all the unhappy trends I have witnessed-conservative
swings on television networks, dwindling newspaper circulation, the jailing
of reporters and "spin"-nothing is more troubling to me than
the obsequious press during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. They lapped
up everything the Pentagon and White House could dish out-no questions
asked.
-
- Reporters and editors like to think of
themselves as watchdogs for the public good. But in recent years both individual
reporters and their ever-growing corporate ownership have defaulted on
that role. Ted Stannard, an academic and former UPI correspondent, put
it this way: "When watchdogs, bird dogs, and bull dogs morph into
lap dogs, lazy dogs, or yellow dogs, the nation is in trouble."
-
- The na've complicity of the press and
the government was never more pronounced than in the prelude to the invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq. The media became an echo chamber for White House
pronouncements. One example: At President Bush's March 6, 2003, news conference,
in which he made it eminently clear that the United States was going to
war, one reporter pleased the "born again" Bush when she asked
him if he prayed about going to war. And so it went.
-
- After all, two of the nation's most prestigious
newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, had kept up a drumbeat
for war with Iraq to bring down dictator Saddam Hussein. They accepted
almost unquestioningly the bogus evidence of weapons of mass destruction,
the dubious White House rationale that proved to be so costly on a human
scale, not to mention a drain on the Treasury. The Post was much more hawkish
than the Times-running many editorials pumping up the need to wage war
against the Iraqi dictator-but both newspapers played into the hands of
the Administration.
-
- When Secretary of State Colin Powell
delivered his ninety-minute "boffo" statement on Saddam's lethal
toxic arsenal on February 5, 2003, before the United Nations, the Times
said he left "little question that Mr. Hussein had tried hard to conceal"
a so-called smoking gun or weapons of mass destruction. After two US special
weapons inspection task forces, headed by chief weapons inspector David
Kay and later by Charles Duelfer, came up empty in the scouring of Iraq
for WMD, did you hear any apologies from the Bush Administration? Of course
not. It simply changed its rationale for the war-several times. Nor did
the media say much about the failed weapons search. Several newspapers
made it a front-page story but only gave it one-day coverage. As for Powell,
he simply lost his halo. The newspapers played his back-pedaling inconspicuously
on the back pages.
-
- My concern is why the nation's media
were so gullible. Did they really think it was all going to be so easy,
a "cakewalk," a superpower invading a Third World country? Why
did the Washington press corps forgo its traditional skepticism? Why did
reporters become cheerleaders for a deceptive Administration? Could it
be that no one wanted to stand alone outside Washington's pack journalism?
-
- Tribune Media Services editor Robert
Koehler summed it up best. In his August 20, 2004, column in the San Francisco
Chronicle Koehler wrote, "Our print media pacesetters, the New York
Times, and just the other day, the Washington Post, have searched their
souls over the misleading pre-war coverage they foisted on the nation last
year, and blurted out qualified Reaganesque mea culpas: 'Mistakes were
made.'"
-
- All the blame cannot be laid at the doorstep
of the print media. CNN's war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, was critical
of her own network for not asking enough questions about WMD. She attributed
it to the competition for ratings with Fox, which had an inside track to
top Administration officials.
-
- Despite the apologies of the mainstream
press for not having vigilantly questioned evidence of WMD and links to
terrorists in the early stages of the war, the newspapers dropped the ball
again by ignoring for days a damaging report in the London Times on May
1, 2005. That report revealed the so-called Downing Street memo, the minutes
of a high-powered confidential meeting that British Prime Minister Tony
Blair held with his top advisers on Bush's forthcoming plans to attack
Iraq. At the secret session Richard Dearlove, former head of British intelligence,
told Blair that Bush "wanted to remove Saddam Hussein through military
action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy."
-
- The Downing Street memo was a bombshell
when discussed by the bloggers, but the mainstream print media ignored
it until it became too embarrassing to suppress any longer. The Post discounted
the memo as old news and pointed to reports it had many months before on
the buildup to the war. Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Michael
Kinsley decided that the classified minutes of the Blair meeting were not
a "smoking gun." The New York Times touched on the memo in a
dispatch during the last days leading up to the British elections, but
put it in the tenth paragraph.
-
- All this took me back to the days immediately
following the unraveling of the Watergate scandal. The White House press
corps realized it had fallen asleep at the switch-not that all the investigative
reporting could have been done by those on the so-called "body watch,"
which travels everywhere with the President and has no time to dig for
facts. But looking back, they knew they had missed many clues on the Watergate
scandal and were determined to become much more skeptical of what was being
dished out to them at the daily briefings. And, indeed, they were. The
White House press room became a lion's den.
-
- By contrast, after the White House lost
its credibility in rationalizing the pre-emptive assault on Iraq, the correspondents
began to come out of their coma, yet they were still too timid to challenge
Administration officials, who were trying to put a good face on a bad situation.
-
- I recall one exchange of mine with press
secretary Scott McClellan last May that illustrates the difference, and
what I mean by the skeptical reporting during Watergate.
-
- Helen: The other day, in fact this week,
you [McClellan] said that we, the United States, are in Afghanistan and
Iraq by invitation. Would you like to correct that incredible distortion
of American history?
-
- Scott: No. We are.that's where we are
currently.
-
- Helen: In view of your credibility, which
is already mired.how can you say that?
-
- Scott: Helen, I think everyone in this
room knows that you're taking that comment out of context. There are two
democratically elected governments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
-
- Helen: Were we invited into Iraq?
-
- Scott: There are democratically elected
governments now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are there at their invitation.
They are sovereign governments, but we are there today.
-
- Helen: You mean, if they asked us out,
that we would have left?
-
- Scott: No, Helen, I'm talking about today.
We are there at their invitation. They are sovereign governments.
-
- Helen: I'm talking about today, too.
-
- Scott: We are doing all we can to train
and equip their security forces so that they can provide their own security
as they move forward on a free and democratic future.
-
- Helen: Did we invade those countries?
-
- At that point McClellan called on another
reporter.
-
- Those were the days when I longed for
ABC-TV's great Sam Donaldson to back up my questions as he always did,
and I did the same for him and other daring reporters. Then I realized
that the old pros, reporters whom I had known in the past, many of them
around during World War II and later the Vietnam War, reporters who had
some historical perspective on government deception and folly, were not
around anymore.
-
- I honestly believe that if reporters
had put the spotlight on the flaws in the Bush Administration's war policies,
they could have saved the country the heartache and the losses of American
and Iraqi lives.
-
- It is past time for reporters to forget
the party line, ask the tough questions and let the chips fall where they
may.
-
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- http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060327&s=thomas
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