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<DIV><SPAN class=body_headline_title>Fears Impacted U.S. Reporting on Iraq
</SPAN><BR><SPAN class=story_date><B>Updated:</B> Saturday, Mar. 20, 2004 - 7:55
AM</SPAN>
<P><!-- ========================== STORY BODY ================================= -->
<DIV><SPAN class=body_rich_text>By MIELIKKI ORG <BR>Associated Press Writer
<P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>"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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>"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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>A call to the Times for comment was not immediately returned on Friday.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>"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."</P></SPAN></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>