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U.S. Media Admits ‘Failures’ In Pre-War Iraq Coverage
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Reliability of Chalabi's info was questioned by the intelligence community, but the debate did not appear in the U.S. media |
NEW
YORK, May 3 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Over one year
after the occupation of Iraq, the U.S. media has started to look
deeper at its coverage of Washington’s arguments leading up to an
invasion that defied the will of the international community and the
majority of the world public opinions.
"This
has been the most shameful era of American media and for American
democracy," argued Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer
during a March conference on the war and the media at Berkeley
University in California, according to a report by Agence
France-Presse (AFP) Sunday, May 2.
U.S.
President George W. Bush still bears the brunt of media criticism over
the Iraq occupation, but U.S. journalists have now started an
introspection of their coverage of the administration's pre-war
arguments for ousting Saddam Hussein.
The
media failed to question the links being made between Saddam's regime
and the September 11, 2001, attacks and the "war on terror,"
Scheer said.
"Why
did the media get distracted?" he asked.
"There
couldn't have been a single intelligent person in the media who
actually thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Yet they went along
with the line," he said. "The media has been sucker-punched
completely by this administration."
The
U.S. administration has based its pre-invasion rationale on a group of
allegations, on top of which were Iraq’s possession of banned
weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of the regime with
al-Qaeda network.
So
far, no such weapons were ever found and al-Qaeda link was never
proved.
John
Burns, who covered the war for The New York Times, issued a mea culpa
for the media.
"We
failed the American public in the period leading up to the war, by
being insufficiently critical of the elements of the administration's
plan to go to war," he said via telephone from Baghdad during the
conference, according to AFP.
New
York Times military correspondent Michael Gordon, however, defended
the press's coverage of the weapons debate.
"The
notion that Iraq had some form of WMD was a widely shared assumption
inside and outside of the government," Gordon wrote last month to
the New York Review of Books in response to a critical article on the
U.S. media by author and journalist Michael Massing.
"It
was possible, for example, to challenge the CIA's claim that Iraq had
sought to purchase aluminum tubes to produce enriched uranium and
still hold the view that Saddam Hussein was probably trying to
reconstitute his nuclear weapons program," Gordon wrote.
Why
Waiting?
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A caricature of “British media and Parliament” asking Tony Blair: Where are the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Blair turns to Bush with the same question but gets no answer |
Massing
wondered why the media waited until after the war to write critically
about the Bush administration's allegations.
"In
recent months, U.S. news organizations have rushed to expose the Bush
administration's pre-war failings on Iraq," Massing wrote in his
critique published in February.
"'Iraq's
arsenal was only on paper,' declared a recent headline in the
Washington Post. 'So, what went wrong?' asked Time (magazine). ...
Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you
all before the war?" Massing asked.
He
criticized The New York Times for relying on information from
controversial Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who provided the U.S.
government with intelligence on Iraq's suspected weapons cache.
Massing
said the intelligence community questioned the reliability of
Chalabi's information, but the debate did not appear in the U.S.
media.
"Not
until September 29, 2003 for instance, did the New York Times get
around to informing readers about the controversy over Chalabi,"
he wrote. "Some reporters at the paper had relied heavily on
Chalabi as a source."
The
government has mastered the art of using the media, particularly
television, said David Boeyink, a journalism professor at Indiana
University.
"The
media is in part at fault for not doing more on its own but it really
has become in many ways a captive of whatever message seems to be
coming out of Washington," Boeyink told AFP.
"If
the administration was misleading us on its intelligence reports
coming out of Iraq, it's pretty hard to know where we can get the
information to counter that," he said.
"Where's
the blame to be placed? is it to be placed on the media? or on the
government that made these statements?"
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