Post-Iraq Syndrome

By Matt Taibbi, New York Press. Posted August 18, 2004.

With all due respect to the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, who was polite to me when we spoke on the phone earlier this year, I had to laugh at his 3,000-word "We Fucked Up on Iraq" piece that came out last week.

Kurtz's Aug. 12 piece, entitled "The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story; Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn't Make Front Page," was the latest in what is likely to be a long series of tepid media mea culpas about pre-war Iraq reporting. The piece comes on the heels of the New York Times' infamous "The Bitch Set Us Up" piece from this past May, in which that paper implicitly blamed hyperambitious hormone-case Judith Miller for its hilarious prewar failures.

The Kurtz article was a curious piece of writing. In reading it, I was reminded of a scene I once witnessed at the New England Aquarium in Boston, in the aqua-petting-zoo section on the second floor.

The petting pool contained a sea cucumber. Now, anyone who has ever made it through seventh-grade science class knows what a sea cucumber does when threatened. Unfortunately, some parent unleashed a sixth-grader on the pool unattended. The kid started fucking with the sea cucumber, poking and prodding it like crazy. So the sea cucumber pulled out its only defense mechanism, turning itself inside out and showing its nasty guts to the poor kid, who immediately thought he'd killed the thing and ran away crying. Later, when I made another turn through the same area of the aquarium, the cucumber had reconstituted itself and was sitting in its usual log-like position.

It is hard to imagine a better metaphor for these post-invasion auto-crucifixions our papers of record have been giving us lately.

The Post piece featured an array of senior and less-senior reporters who let us in on the shocking revelation that stories questioning the Bush administration's pre-war intelligence claims were often buried deep in the news section, while Bush claims ran on the front. Revelations included the heartwarming Thelma & Louise tale of Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward teaming up to get Pincus' WMD skepticism piece into the paper just days before the country went over the cliff into Iraq. In fact, the second paragraph of the piece is devoted to this tale of editorial foxhole heroism:

...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.

Quite a lot of Kurtz's article is devoted to such backdoor compliments, with numerous reminders throughout the text that the Post, relatively speaking, did a better job than most papers on Iraq. Much of the piece was framed in this "But on the other hand..." rhetorical format, in which admissions of poor performance surfed home on waves of somber self-congratulation. Some examples:

The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page.

The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.

Quoting media critic Michael Massing: "'In covering the run-up to the war, The Post did better than most other news organizations...' But on the key issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the paper was generally napping along with everyone else."

Given The Post's reputation for helping topple the Nixon administration... the paper's shortcomings did not reflect any reticence about taking on the Bush White House.

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..."

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