[Media-watch] Washington Post Mea Culpa - paper buried antiwar and WMD stories - Washington Post - 12/08/2004

[David Miller]

Maybe we should all write to the Observer, Guardian and Independent and ask
them to say sorry too?

David ;)

> From: "Julie-ann Davies" <jadavies2004 at yahoo.co.uk>
> Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 01:27:27 +0100
> To: "Media-watch" <media-watch at lists.stir.ac.uk>
> Subject: [Media-watch] Washington Post Mea Culpa - paper buried antiwar and
> WMD stories - Washington Post - 12/08/2004
> 
> Long piece, over 3,100 words, I have posted it in full here as the site
> requires registration. Please accept my apologies if this causes anyone any
> inconvenience.
> 
> 
> 
> Julie-ann
> 
> _____________________
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58127-2004Aug11.html
> 
> 
> 
> The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story
> Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn't Make Front Page
> By Howard Kurtz
> 
> Washington Post Staff Writer
> Thursday, August 12, 2004; Page A01
> 
> Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter
> Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had
> proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
> 
> But he ran into resistance from the paper's editors, and his piece ran only
> after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book
> about the drive toward war, "helped sell the story," Pincus recalled.
> "Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper." Even
> so, the article was relegated to Page A17.
> 
> "We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not
> pushing harder," Woodward said in an interview. "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."
> 
> As violence continues in postwar Iraq and U.S. forces have yet to discover
> any WMDs, some critics say the media, including The Washington Post, failed
> the country by not reporting more skeptically on President Bush's
> contentions during the run-up to war.
> 
> An examination of the paper's coverage, and interviews with more than a
> dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that The Post 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.
> 
> "The paper was not front-paging stuff," said 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?"
> 
> In retrospect, said 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," Downie said. "We didn't pay enough attention to the minority."
> 
> When national security reporter Dana Priest was addressing a group of
> intelligence officers recently, she said, she was peppered with questions:
> "Why didn't The Post do a more aggressive job? Why didn't The Post ask more
> questions? Why didn't The Post dig harder?"
> 
> Several news organizations have cast a withering eye on their earlier work.
> The New York Times said in a May editor's note about stories that claimed
> progress in the hunt for WMDs that editors "were perhaps too intent on
> rushing scoops into the paper." Separately, the Times editorial page and the
> New Republic magazine expressed regret for some prewar arguments.
> 
> Michael Massing, a New York Review of Books contributor and author of the
> forthcoming book "Now They Tell Us," on the press and Iraq, said: "In
> covering the run-up to the war, The Post did better than most other news
> organizations, featuring a number of solid articles about the Bush
> administration's policies. But on the key issue of Iraq's weapons of mass
> destruction, the paper was generally napping along with everyone else. It
> gave readers little hint of the doubts that a number of intelligence
> analysts had about the administration's claims regarding Iraq's arsenal."
> 
> The front page is a newspaper's billboard, its way of making a statement
> about what is important, and stories trumpeted there are often picked up by
> other news outlets. Editors begin pitching stories at a 2 p.m. news meeting
> with Downie and Managing Editor Steve Coll and, along with some reporters,
> lobby throughout the day. But there is limited space on Page 1 -- usually
> six or seven stories -- and Downie said he likes to feature a broad range of
> subjects, including education, health, science, sports and business.
> 
> Woodward, for his part, said it was risky for journalists to write anything
> that might look silly if weapons were ultimately found in Iraq. Alluding to
> the finding of the Sept. 11 commission of a "groupthink" among intelligence
> officials, Woodward said of the weapons coverage: "I think I was part of the
> groupthink."
> 
> Given The Post's reputation for helping topple the Nixon administration,
> some of those involved in the prewar coverage felt compelled to say the
> paper's shortcomings did not reflect any reticence about taking on the Bush
> White House. Priest noted, however, that skeptical stories usually triggered
> hate mail "questioning your patriotism and suggesting that you somehow be
> delivered into the hands of the terrorists."
> 
> Instead, the obstacles ranged from editing difficulties and communication
> problems to the sheer mass of information the newsroom was trying to digest
> during the march to war.
> 
> The Doubts Go Inside
> 
>> From August 2002 through the March 19, 2003, launch of the war, The Post ran
> more than 140 front-page stories that focused heavily on administration
> rhetoric against Iraq. Some examples: "Cheney Says Iraqi Strike Is
> Justified"; "War Cabinet Argues for Iraq Attack"; "Bush Tells United Nations
> It Must Stand Up to Hussein or U.S. Will"; "Bush Cites Urgent Iraqi Threat";
> "Bush Tells Troops: Prepare for War."
> 
> Reporter Karen DeYoung, a former assistant managing editor who covered the
> prewar diplomacy, said contrary information sometimes got lost.
> 
> "If there's something I would do differently -- and it's always easy in
> hindsight -- the top of the story would say, 'We're going to war, we're
> going to war against evil.' But later down it would say, 'But some people
> are questioning it.' The caution and the questioning was buried underneath
> the drumbeat. . . . The hugeness of the war preparation story tended to
> drown out a lot of that stuff."
> 
> Beyond that, there was the considerable difficulty of dealing with secretive
> intelligence officials who themselves were relying on sketchy data from
> Iraqi defectors and other shadowy sources and could never be certain about
> what they knew.
> 
> On Sept. 19, 2002, reporter Joby Warrick described a report "by independent
> experts who question whether thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes
> recently sought by Iraq were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program,"
> as the administration was contending. The story ran on Page A18.
> 
> Warrick said he was "going out on a limb. . . . I was struck by the people I
> talked to -- some on the record, others who couldn't be -- who were saying
> pretty persistently that these tubes were in no way suitable for uranium
> enrichment. On the other side were these CIA guys who said, 'Look, we know
> what we're talking about but we can't tell you.' "
> 
> Downie said that even in retrospect, the story looks like "a close call." He
> said the inability of dissenters "to speak up with their names" was a factor
> in some of his news judgments. The Post, however, frequently quotes unnamed
> sources.
> 
> Not all such stories were pushed inside the paper. A follow-up Warrick piece
> on the aluminum tubes did run on Page 1 the following January, two months
> before the war began. And The Post gave front-page play to a Sept. 10, 2002,
> story by Priest contending that "the CIA has yet to find convincing
> evidence" linking Hussein and al Qaeda.
> 
> That hardly settled the matter. On Dec. 12, 2002, investigative reporter
> Barton Gellman -- who would later win acclaim for his skeptical postwar
> stories from Iraq on WMDs -- wrote a controversial piece that ombudsman
> Michael Getler complained "practically begs you not to put much credence in
> it." The headline: "U.S. Suspects Al Qaeda Got Nerve Agent From Iraqis."
> 
> The story, attributed to "two officials with firsthand knowledge of the
> report" to the Bush administration "and its source," said in the second
> paragraph that "if the report proves true" -- a whopper of a qualifier -- it
> would be "the most concrete evidence" yet to support Bush's charge that Iraq
> was helping terrorists.
> 
> Gellman does not believe he was used. "The sources were not promoting the
> war. . . . One of them was actually against it," he said. "They were career
> security officials, not political officials. They were, however, wrong."
> Gellman added that "it was news even though it was clear that it was
> possible this report would turn out to be false."
> 
> But sources, even suspect ones, were the only game in town. "We had no
> alternative sources of information," Woodward said. "Walter [Pincus] and I
> couldn't go to Iraq without getting killed. You couldn't get beyond the
> veneer and hurdle of what this groupthink had already established" -- the
> conventional wisdom that Hussein was sitting on a stockpile of illegal
> weapons.
> 
> In October 2002, Ricks, a former national security editor for the Wall
> Street Journal who has been covering such issues for 15 years, turned in a
> piece that he titled "Doubts." It said that senior Pentagon officials were
> resigned to an invasion but were reluctant and worried that the risks were
> being underestimated. Most of those quoted by name in the Ricks article were
> retired military officials or outside experts. The story was killed by
> Matthew Vita, then the national security editor and now a deputy assistant
> managing editor.
> 
> "Journalistically, one of the frustrations with that story was that it was
> filled with lots of retired guys," Vita said. But, he added, "I completely
> understood the difficulty of getting people inside the Pentagon" to speak
> publicly.
> 
> Liz Spayd, the assistant managing editor for national news, says The Post's
> overall record was strong.
> 
> "I believe we pushed as hard or harder than anyone to question the
> administration's assertions on all kinds of subjects related to the war. . .
> . Do I wish we would have had more and pushed harder and deeper into
> questions of whether they possessed weapons of mass destruction?
> Absolutely," she said. "Do I feel we owe our readers an apology? I don't
> think so."
> 
> Digger or Crusader?
> 
> No Post reporter burrowed into the Iraqi WMD story more deeply than Pincus,
> 71, a staff member for 32 of the last 38 years, whose messy desk is always
> piled high with committee reports and intelligence files. "The main thing
> people forget to do is read documents," said Pincus, wielding a yellow
> highlighter.
> 
> A white-haired curmudgeon who spent five years covering the Iran-contra
> scandal and has long been an expert on nuclear weapons, Pincus sometimes had
> trouble convincing editors of the importance of his incremental,
> difficult-to-read stories.
> 
> His longevity is such that he first met Hans Blix, who was the chief U.N.
> weapons inspector in Iraq, at a conference in Ghana in 1959.
> 
> "The inspectors kept getting fed intelligence by our administration and the
> British and the French, and kept coming back and saying they couldn't find"
> the weapons, Pincus said. "I did one of the first interviews with Blix, and
> like everyone else he thought there would be WMDs. By January and February
> [of 2003], he was starting to have his own doubts. . . . What nobody talked
> about was how much had been destroyed," either under U.N. supervision after
> the Persian Gulf War or during the Clinton administration's 1998 bombing of
> Iraqi targets.
> 
> But while Pincus was ferreting out information "from sources I've used for
> years," some in the Post newsroom were questioning his work. Editors
> complained that he was "cryptic," as one put it, and that his hard-to-follow
> stories had to be heavily rewritten.
> 
> Spayd declined to discuss Pincus's writing but said that "stories on
> intelligence are always difficult to edit and parse and to ensure their
> accuracy and get into the paper."
> 
> Downie agreed that difficulties in editing Pincus may have been a factor in
> the prewar period, because he is "so well sourced" that his reporting often
> amounts to putting together "fragments" until the pieces were, in Downie's
> word, "storifyable."
> 
> Some editors, in Pincus's view, also saw him as a "crusader," as he once put
> it to Washingtonian magazine. "That's sort of my reputation, and I don't
> deny it," he said. "Once I get on a subject, I stay with it."
> 
> On Jan. 30, 2003, Pincus and Priest reported that the evidence the
> administration was amassing about Baghdad hiding weapons equipment and
> documents "is still circumstantial." The story ran on Page A14.
> 
> Some of the reporters who attended the daily "war meetings," where coverage
> was planned, complained to national editors that the drumbeat of the
> impending invasion was crowding out the work of Pincus and others who were
> challenging the administration.
> 
> Pincus was among the complainers. "Walter talked to me himself," Downie
> said. "He sought me out when he was frustrated, and I sought him out. We
> talked about how best to have stories be in the kind of shape that they
> could appear on the front page." Editors were also frustrated, Downie said.
> "Overall, in retrospect, we underplayed some of those stories."
> 
> The Woodward Factor
> 
> Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials had no
> problem commanding prime real estate in the paper, even when their warnings
> were repetitive. "We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever
> administration is in power," DeYoung said. "If the president stands up and
> says something, we report what the president said." And if contrary
> arguments are put "in the eighth paragraph, where they're not on the front
> page, a lot of people don't read that far."
> 
> Those tendencies were on display on Feb. 6, 2003, the day after Secretary of
> State Colin Powell delivered a multimedia presentation at the United
> Nations -- using satellite images and intercepted phone calls -- to convince
> the world that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
> 
> An accompanying front-page story by DeYoung and Pincus examined Powell's
> "unprecedented release of U.S. intelligence." Not until the ninth paragraph
> did they offer a "however" clause, saying that "a number of European
> officials and U.S. terrorism experts" believed that Powell's description of
> an Iraqi link to al Qaeda "appeared to have been carefully drawn to imply
> more than it actually said."
> 
> Warrick focused that day on the secretary's assertion, based on human
> sources, that Iraq had biological weapons factories on wheels. "Some of the
> points in Powell's presentation drew skepticism," Warrick reported. His
> piece ran on Page A28.
> 
> Downie said the paper ran several pieces analyzing Powell's speech as a
> package on inside pages. "We were not able to marshal enough evidence to say
> he was wrong," Downie said of Powell. "To pull one of those out on the front
> page would be making a statement on our own: 'Aha, he's wrong about the
> aluminum tubes.' "
> 
> Such decisions coincided with The Post editorial page's strong support for
> the war, such as its declaration the day after Powell's presentation that
> "it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of
> mass destruction." These editorials led some readers to conclude that the
> paper had an agenda, even though there is a church-and-state wall between
> the newsroom and the opinion pages. Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, not
> Downie, runs the opinion side, reporting to Post Co. Chairman Donald Graham.
> 
> In mid-March, as the administration was on the verge of invading Iraq,
> Woodward stepped in to give the stalled Pincus piece about the
> administration's lack of evidence a push. "We weren't holding it for any
> political reason or because we were being pressured by the administration,"
> Spayd said, but because such stories were difficult to edit at a time when
> the national desk was deluged with copy. "People forget how many facets of
> this story we were chasing . . . the political ramifications . . . military
> readiness . . . issues around postwar Iraq and how prepared the
> administration was . . . diplomacy angles . . . and we were pursuing WMD. .
> . . All those stories were competing for prominence."
> 
> As a star of the Watergate scandal who is given enormous amounts of time to
> work on his best-selling books, Woodward, an assistant managing editor, had
> the kind of newsroom clout that Pincus lacked.
> 
> The two men's recollections differ. Woodward said that after comparing notes
> with Pincus, he gave him a draft story consisting of five key paragraphs,
> which said the administration's evidence for WMDs in Iraq "looks
> increasingly circumstantial and even shaky," according to "informed
> sources." Woodward said Pincus found his wording too strong.
> 
> Pincus said he had already written his story when Woodward weighed in and
> that he treated his colleague's paragraphs as a suggestion and barely
> changed the piece. "What he really did was talk to the editors and made sure
> it was printed," Pincus said.
> 
> "Despite the Bush administration's claims" about WMDs, the March 16 Pincus
> story began, "U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress
> or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or
> where they are hidden, according to administration officials and members of
> Congress," raising questions "about whether administration officials have
> exaggerated intelligence."
> 
> Woodward said he wished he had appealed to Downie to get front-page play for
> the story, rather than standing by as it ended up on Page A17. In that
> period, said former national security editor Vita, "we were dealing with an
> awful lot of stories, and that was one of the ones that slipped through the
> cracks." Spayd did not recall the debate.
> 
> Reviewing the story in his glass-walled office last week, Downie said: "In
> retrospect, that probably should have been on Page 1 instead of A17, even
> though it wasn't a definitive story and had to rely on unnamed sources. It
> was a very prescient story."
> 
> In the days before the war, Priest and DeYoung turned in a piece that said
> CIA officials "communicated significant doubts to the administration" about
> evidence tying Iraq to attempted uranium purchases for nuclear weapons. The
> story was held until March 22, three days after the war began. Editors
> blamed a flood of copy about the impending invasion.
> 
> Whether a tougher approach by The Post and other news organizations would
> have slowed the rush to war is, at best, a matter of conjecture.
> 
> "People who were opposed to the war from the beginning and have been
> critical of the media's coverage in the period before the war have this
> belief that somehow the media should have crusaded against the war," Downie
> said. "They have the mistaken impression that somehow if the media's
> coverage had been different, there wouldn't have been a war."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Media-watch mailing list
> Media-watch at lists.stir.ac.uk
> http://lists.stir.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/media-watch
>