Fear of seeming unpatriotic prevented critical Iraq reporting

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/8236785.htm

Fear of seeming unpatriotic prevented critical Iraq reporting

MIELIKKI ORG
Associated Press
BERKELEY, Calif. - 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.
Journalists participating in the event 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.
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
A call to the Times for comment was not immediately returned on Friday.
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.
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.
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.
"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."

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