"Media Lessons" David Corn strikes back against WaPo Mea Culpa!

[KoKo]

Media Lessons
David Corn
August 18, 2004

It is rather unusual for a news media leader to suggest that if the public is better informed the national discourse will not produce different—or better—policy outcomes. But that is what Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post , suggested last week to a reporter for his own newspaper.

Downie’s remark came at the end of a long front-page quasi-mea culpa that concluded that the paper’s prewar coverage of the weapons of mass destruction controversy “in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.” The article, written by Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, whacked the Post for having failed to scrutinize vigorously the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s supposed WMDs and for having relegated articles that did challenge the White House view to inside pages where they would receive less attention and cause little fuss. Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks told Kurtz, “Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff.”

It is commendable the Post allowed Kurtz to do this piece (which touts the under-appreciated efforts of reporter Walter Pincus to investigate the WMD claims of the Bush administration). Downie was forthright in telling Kurtz, “We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration’s rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part.” Assistant managing editor Bob Woodward said, “We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for shakier” than the White House maintained.

The piece was fascinating not because it was an admission of error but because it revealed how the people who steer one of the most important media outlets in the United States view their role in the national debate. Reporter Karen DeYoung, a former assistant managing editor, said, “We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power. If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said.” If contrary information appears “in the eighth paragraph,” she added, “where they’re not on the front page, a lot of people don’t read that far.” In his defense, Downie pointed to the paper’s reporting on Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 presentation at the U.N. Security Council. He rightly noted that the paper published several pieces analyzing Powell’s speech—each of which quoted experts who took issue with Powell’s argument—on the inside. (The New York Times did not submit Powell’s appearance to such an examination.) But Downie added, “To pull one of those out on the front page would be making a statement on our own: ‘Aha, he’s wrong about the aluminum tubes.’” And Downie dismissed the consequences of his paper’s negligence: “People who were opposed to the war from the beginning and have been critical of the media’s coverage in the period before the war have this belief that somehow the media should have crusaded against the war. They have the mistaken impression that somehow if the media’s coverage had been different, there wouldn’t have been a war.”

http://www.tompaine.com/print/media_lessons.php

[realFedUp]

1. coulda, woulda, shoulda.

too late now.

[teryang]

2. Cheerleaders for war and corporatism

That's where their bread is buttered.

[UpInArms]

3. squelching debate is what they did

and they allowed those that opposed and questioned to be called names without any examination - they dictated the dialog and they suppressed the dissent.

They (the editors) should be banned charged with treason to the country and should lose their citizenship as they care not a whit about democracy.

[himself]

4. What's up with Downie?

t shouldn't amaze me, but it does: the executive editor of the paper that hounded Nixon from office says that reporting the truth in the case of 'Iraq' would have been useless.

Fool that I am, I hold onto the hope that some editor - some central figure in mainstream media - will begin to believe in his/her profession as the check on power that it once was, and that many of the more idealistic among us still believe it could be. (I probably owe Downey a favor for disabusing me of that.)

It may take the death(s) of hundreds more papers before newsroom people rally to the cause of the truth, and if not for that, for their own survival. Owners don't care - they can cash out and buy a baseball team. For now, the truth is pointless, and we live in a fictitious age, as Michael Moore says.

What is Downey confessing? That the Post knew in advance (but didn't report) that the war was bound to happen? That it was blowing smoke for the White House? That the US is a dictatorship?

Time for those of us who write to editors and journalists to give it a rest and get back on the streets.