Editor & Publisher - June 12, 2003 Was Press Asleep on Pre-War WMD Issue? Strupp Talks to 5 Top Editors
By Joe Strupp
Opinion
Last week, profound questions arose concerning the Bush administration's key reason for invading Iraq: the threat posed by that country's huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Reporters and commentators are now vigorously pursuing the possibility that poor intelligence overstated the threat -- or that the administration deliberately misled the American people in its rush to go to war.
In addition to the White House, however, the press must take some of the blame, for failing to push the administration hard enough prior to the war about the existence of such weapons.
Although newspapers before the war did report the disagreement between administration officials and U.N. weapons inspectors, few major papers took the issue on full-throttle with demands for answers -- or dissected the sketchiness of the administration's evidence of vast stockpiles of WMDs.
"I'm sure the press could have done more," Tim Connelly, international editor of The Dallas Morning News, told me last week. "Questions were being raised, not necessarily by the press, but by diplomats. The skepticism was there, but it may be the case that the press failed to ask this or that question. The British press has been more aggressive in challenging the British intelligence material."
Indeed, many episodes of pre-war maneuvering, such as Colin Powell's crucial presentation to the U.N. General Assembly, should have prompted more skepticism from editors and reporters.
Instead, most papers declared or strongly suggested that Powell had succcessfully "made the case" for an invasion. Only later did we discover that much of Powell's evidence was thin or even fabricated. Bush's rigid press conference restrictions brought almost no complaints from a press corps that should always probe deeper prior to a war.
"Clearly, the reporting on this before the war may not have been critical enough," said John Walcott, Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Knight Ridder. "It is possible that we in the press made essentially the same mistakes that the intelligence community made - to extrapolate from what we learned in the 1990s from weapons inspectors about Iraq weapons programs, and not consider that Iraqi behavior might have changed."
Other editors, such as Phil Bronstein, executive vice president and editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, agreed that more could have been done, but placed part of the blame on the administration's failure to be open. "Could the press have been more aggressive? Probably," said Bronstein, who covered the first Persian Gulf War as a correspondent. "I saw a lot of stories that raised the issues. But at the end of the day, the government controls the information."
There are editors who contend they did everything possible to hold the administration's feet to the fire. Paul Van Slambrouck, editor of The Christian Science Monitor in Boston, said his paper and others did a good job of presenting the Bush arguments and the opposition raised by diplomats, U.N. inspectors and other anti-war voices. "I think the press was frustrated with the answers, but I don't know if that is the fault of the press not asking aggressively enough," he said. "The press poked at it as reasonably as it could."
Martin Baron, editor of The Boston Globe, said newspapers cannot make the federal government disclose more than it wants to. "We raised questions about it at the time, we looked at the evidence one by one and the strength of the arguments," he said. "No one could possibly know until there was a war and U.S. officials were able to go and look for themselves."
But isn't that the whole point of the press challenging the administration before the war? To expose the fact that no firm proof of weapons of mass destruction existed -- and that the President's case could be based on faulty intelligence or, worse, an all-out drive for war? While few shed tears for the exit of the murderous Saddam Hussein, the press needs to remind the public that the war was sold to them not on the basis of "regime change" but on the personal threat to Americans posed by Saddam's so-far-missing weapons.