Going It Alone, Accolades...to Knight Ridder

[Rose Siding]

When the New York Times apologized to readers May 26 for not being "more aggressive" in examining the administration's decision to invade Iraq, editors couldn't help but give a nod to a less-vaunted news organization that had been beating the Times on the story for some time: Knight Ridder's Washington bureau.

The contrast in coverage was stark at times. On September 8, 2002, the Times proclaimed in a front-page headline, "U.S. Says Hussein Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts." Knight Ridder had two days earlier proclaimed, "Lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons worries top U.S. officials." Knight Ridder continued with headlines like "Troubling questions over justification for war in Iraq" and "Failure to find weapons in Iraq leads to intelligence scrutiny," even as most other major media outlets sang a tune more in line with the Bush administration.


It wasn't until February that Michael Massing bestowed some of the first accolades on Knight Ridder, writing in The New York Review of Books: "Almost alone among national news organizations, Knight Ridder had decided to take a hard look at the administration's justifications for war."
more............

http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=3725

[Robert Murphy]

1. Too Bad What They Reported Will Likely Go Down the Memory Hole...

An admirable performance by Knight-Ridder indeed. (Note that they received some 'unfriendly' phone calls from Administration officials for said coverage, on several occasions.)

What has astonished me--and I had previously thought the U.S. media could get no worse--is that all of pre-war skepticism about W. Admin. claims of Iraqi WMDs seems ENTIRELY forgotten. I clearly remember reading (having long since given up on the TV news media) a score of articles regarding the the mulititude of significant qualifications and reservations attached to U.S. intelligence reports on Iraqi WMDs, which the Bush Administration was willfully ignoring in its selling of the war. Granted, one had to read the back pages of the Washington Post or (much more rarely--thanks Judy Miller!) the NY Times to find such stories, but they were there. (Even the AP syndicated a few articles voicing these uncertainties.) Add to this the fact that NO OTHER country, save the UK--who was doing some serious fudging of their own--was backing up the Administrations claims. (Ditto for the U.N. inspectors on the ground in Iraq, whose efforts were deliberately hampered by false intelligence fed to them by the U.S.)

But now--Oh no!! It was all the @%%^$%@# CIA's fault! The poor Bush Administration was innocently misled!!

I am not privy (surprise!!) to Top Secret information, nor do I claim to be any expert on foreign affairs. But in the lead-up to the war, the Administration's claims sounded like utter horse excrement to even to my layman's ear. Yet nowhere in the (at least the TV) news media have I seen a single report even suggesting that the Bushies might have, um, 'exaggerated' the threat posed by Iraq. The slimes are set to get away with lying us into a war--perhaps they have already...

Cheers,

Robert

[cprise]

2. That's nice

Although I doubt they will be around long as an independant voice.

To my recollection, it was BBC World Service, The Guardian, and to a limited extent Reuters that informed the anti-war set before the invasion. These are the ones I remember as making a difference.

[Rose Siding]

3. Here's a link to the Washington Bureau of Knight Ridder

The in-depth good stuff gets posted here-

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/