[Media-watch] Why did it take the media so long to break Abu Ghraib abuse story? - American Journalism Review - Aug/Sept 2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

Long article, so cut, full text available at URL.
JA
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http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3716

 From AJR,   August/September 2004


Missed Signals
Why did it take so long for the news media to break the story of prisoner
abuse at Abu Ghraib?

      Related reading:    Abu Ghraib Time Line


By Sherry Ricchiardi
Sherry Ricchiardi is an AJR senior writer.

Donald H. Rumsfeld could not pass up a chance to gloat.


During a town hall-style meeting with Pentagon workers on May 11, the
defense secretary smugly noted that it was "the military, not the media"
that discovered and reported the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, a hellhole 20
miles west of Baghdad.


Rumsfeld's remarks touched a nerve.


Because, for a variety of reasons, the media were awfully slow to unearth a
scandal that ultimately caused international embarrassment for the United
States and cast a shadow over the war in Iraq. Images of American prison
guards using sexual humiliation and snarling guard dogs to terrify naked
Arab prisoners may well have lasting repercussions for U.S. foreign policy.


What's worse, there was no shortage of signs that something was amiss. For
two years, global monitors such as Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch repeatedly warned of mistreatment of detainees at the hands of
Americans in the dark recesses of Afghanistan and at the holding tank for
suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.


And there were prescient stories, stories that appeared and then vanished
without a trace. On December 26, 2002, the Washington Post published a
breakthrough piece on the CIA's "brass-knuckled quest for information" in
Afghanistan. In March 2003, a cover story in The Nation said that torture
was gaining acceptance in the Bush administration. In November, the
Associated Press was among the first to raise alarms about abuse at Abu
Ghraib - but few of the AP's clients showcased the story, if they ran it at
all.


Then, on January 16 of this year, the U.S. Command in Baghdad issued a
one-paragraph press release: "An investigation has been initiated into
reported incidents of detainee abuse at a Coalition Forces detention
facility. The release of specific information concerning the incidents could
hinder the investigation, which is in its early stages. The investigation
will be conducted in a thorough and professional manner."


The tantalizing but sketchy release didn't exactly set off a media
firestorm. The New York Times published a 367-word report on page 7, noting
that the inquiry was expected to "add fuel" to the burgeoning allegations of
abuse. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a 707-word story, also played on page
7, headlined, "U.S. probes report of abuse of Iraqi detainees." The
Washington Post and USA Today did not run stories on the release, according
to a Lexis-Nexis search. The Boston Globe had about 100 words on the
investigation at the end of an 844-word Iraq story on A4. The Dallas Morning
News ran a 20-word brief on 26A. Television largely ignored the
announcement: CNN and Fox News Channel mentioned it briefly on January 16,
NBC had a 41-word item the following morning, and that was about it.


Then the story largely disappeared. Few followed the misty clue.


Three-and-a-half months later, the degradation at Abu Ghraib finally became
major international news after CBS' "60 Minutes II" on April 28 aired
ghastly photographs of U.S. military police posing and grinning next to
naked, hooded Iraqi prisoners. Two days later, The New Yorker posted Seymour
M. Hersh's scorching account of prisoner mistreatment at the prison.


Why did it take so long for the news media to uncover the scandal? What went
wrong?


Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. wishes his newspaper had
gone harder after the story at the outset. But, he asks, referring to the
January press release, "Have you ever read that paragraph? They made it as
innocent-sounding as possible, and it just wasn't noticed the way it should
have been."


Journalists were not aggressive enough and were slow to grasp the
significance of the military's announcement, says Philip Taubman, the New
York Times' Washington bureau chief. "We didn't do our job with this until
the photographs appeared on CBS" and Hersh's story hit the Internet.


"It was," says Taubman, "a failure of newsgathering."  ...

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