[Media-watch] Fears impacted US reporting on Iraq

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=104&sid=181474

Fears Impacted U.S. Reporting on Iraq 
Updated: Saturday, Mar. 20, 2004 - 7:55 AM 

By MIELIKKI ORG 
Associated Press Writer 

BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - Competitive pressures and a fear of appearing unpatriotic discouraged journalists from doing more critical reporting during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, according to reporters and others at a conference on media coverage of the war.

The journalists on the panels at the University of California at Berkeley this week blamed the Bush administration for leaking faulty information, but said the media also has itself to blame for not being more skeptical about the case for war.

"The press did not do their job," said Michael Massing, who wrote an article in the New York Review of Books that found The New York Times and The Washington Post particularly at fault.

Journalists fear they will be seen as unpatriotic if they challenge White House statements, said Robert Sheer, a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

"There is no doubt that there is an atmosphere of fear in the media of being out of sync with the punitive government," Sheer said.

Much of the criticism focused on a Sept. 8, 2002, New York Times article by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, which said Iraq was importing aluminum tubes that could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium, a critical step in making an atomic bomb.

Massing said nuclear experts or weapons inspectors would have refuted the evidence had the Times consulted them. Experts later verified the tubes were not used for nuclear weapons, but The New York Times and other papers buried that news in their inside pages, he said.

Massing noted that a phrase from the article _ "The first sign of a smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud" _ made it into a speech given by President Bush in the fall of 2002, days before Congress gave him war powers, as well as speeches by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell to justify the war.

A call to the Times for comment was not immediately returned on Friday.

John Burns, the Times' bureau chief in Baghdad, speaking by satellite phone from Iraq, said American reporters are doing a good job of covering the war's aftermath.

In fact, reporters accused of being insufficiently critical are going too far in the other direction when they suggest Iraq is already descending into chaos and civil war, Burns said. He called it "a growing deception among the press and others that there is an air of error and disillusion" in Iraq.

The only government representative at the conference that ran Tuesday through Thursday was Lt. Col. Rick Long, a Marine Corps spokesman. He deflected accusations that the Pentagon decision to embed about 700 journalists with troops fighting in the Iraq war allowed the government to influence their coverage.

"The reason we embedded so many journalists is that we wanted to dominate the information environment," Long said. "We wanted to beat any kind of disinformation or propaganda by beating them at their own game."
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