Fessing Up or Cover-Up?

NEW YORK – As more mainstream media outlets admit to failures in covering the Iraq War, a question must be asked: Are we seeing a real coming to grips by a media that helped "sell the war" to the American public? Or could the recent mea culpas be something more insidious, more like what the CIA used to call a "limited hang out?" That phrase translates as "you concede a little to hide a lot."

I am delighted to see some acknowledgement of errors and omissions on the part of media outlets that, when it really counted, become transmission belts for unsubstantiated government claims and pro-war propaganda.

It does give media critics some faith in the capacity of media outlets to acknowledge wrong doing, correct mistakes and admit they drank the White House Kool-Aid. Bear in mind that many of these same outlets were often arrogant and self-righteous at the time, impervious to war critics whom they treated as lepers in denial about real threats and the need for a preemptive strike.

It has taken a long time for these admissions to surface, alas, well after they can do any good in terms of influencing policy.

Playing Politics with the Facts

In fact, some prominent politicians including a presidential candidate is saying in effect, that none of this matters, that, knowing what they know, they would still have supported the war even if all of its rationalizations were invented and/or deliberately deceptive.

To this day, they won't let the facts get in the way of a politically popular opinion.

That may be because the emerging media debate remains narrowly focused, avoiding deeper questions about the media's performance.

Last week when I was asked to appear on a national TV news program as part of a panel on these issues, I was told that we would talking about the pre-war coverage of WMDs. That call came, predictably, after The Washington Post carried a story second-guessing its coverage focusing entirely on the run-up to the war. Once again TV producers were following a newspaper's lead

Post Media critic Howard Kurtz reported that a story in his paper challenging the evidence on Iraq's weapon stockpiles, "ran into stiff resistance from the paper's editors." The Post's Managing Editor Bob Woodward, author of two insider books largely positive about President Bush, admitted, "We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder."

In his story, Kurtz intimated that The Post's performance was understandable since its chief competitor, The New York Times, was just as bad. He took a subtle swipe at The Times, noting, "The New York Times ran an editor's note last month saying the paper's aggressive reporting on WMDs was 'not as rigorous as it should have been' and overplayed stories with 'dire claims about Iraq,' adding: 'Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.'"

In an apparent response, The Times last week cast a skeptical ours-was-better-than-yours eye on The Post expose, noting: "For all of its contrition, Mr. Kurtz's article does not represent an official statement on behalf of The Post. In an interview yesterday, Steve Coll, the paper's managing editor, said that the idea for the article had been Mr. Kurtz's, and that he and [Executive Editor Leonard] Downie had recused themselves from editing it. 'We did not make a determination from our offices that we needed to commission an investigation into these issues,' Mr. Coll said."

There you have it, no investigation needed. None!

The Real Problem at The Post and The Times

To contrast his paper's efforts, Jacques Steinberg of The Times explained that The New York Times published a 1,220-word article in which the newspaper's editors acknowledged that in the run-up to war they had not been skeptical enough about articles that depended "at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on 'regime change' in Iraq whose credibility has come under increasing public debate."