How the press failed on Iraq

Thomas Ricks, the military reporter for The Washington Post (and author of a fine book about the war, aptly titled "Fiasco"), spoke volumes when he explained his paper's failures in the ramp-up to the war in 2003 by saying, "There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all the contrary stuff?" His colleague Karen DeYoung put it in even more appalling terms: "We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power." Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN when the war began, later informed Bill Moyers that "big people in corporations were calling up" when the network showed civilian casualties, declaring, "You're being anti-American here." Bob Simon, the CBS correspondent, told Moyers that covering the marketing of the war was so "explosive" that he felt he should "keep it, in a way, almost light -- if that doesn't seem ridiculous."

While most of the reporters in Iraq recovered from their early rah-rah "we are taking Baghdad" coverage to produce years of tough-minded and valuable work (to the extent that it was possible amid the horrid violence), their counterparts on the home front often fell down on the job. At times, it seemed that they, not their colleagues traveling with our armed forces in Iraq, were the "embedded" reporters operating under fear of censorship or sanctions for stepping out of line. Declarations from the White House or the military about "progress" in Iraq, or assertions that Iran or al-Qaeda were the true villains there, were reported widely, with contrasting evidence often buried.

Few if any journalists were brave enough to nakedly declare, at any of the many apt opportunities since 2003, that a scheme is not a vision (to borrow the Leonard Cohen lyric). When Chris Matthews, after the U.S. took Baghdad, declared on MSNBC that "We're all neo-cons now," he acted as if that "all" included the press and that this was somehow a good thing. Blindfolding our democracy rarely strengthens us on the battlefield. No lesson for the future could be more clear than the need to take with a huge grain of salt every statement by any official who just might be pushing a cause or covering his ass. Even an emperor -- or a Colin Powell -- sometimes wears no clothes.

Then there was the failure to visually reveal the true horror of what was transpiring in the war. It was bad enough that the Pentagon banned photos of returning coffins; but then TV producers and newspaper editors on their own chose to display few images of the carnage, sanitizing a bloody landscape. Some photographers complained, and Pim Van Hemmen, assistant managing editor for photography at The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., said in 2005, "We in the news business are not doing a very good job of showing our readers what has really happened over there." The U.S. media provided few images of the human cost of war while news outlets in Europe did show photos of dead or wounded.

The past five years of death, destruction and global setback for America's security and image reveal some of the consequences of the media failure to ask more questions, and too often accept weak or misleading answers. Who can forget the Greatest Hits: "Mission Accomplished," "Judy Miller's Turn to Cry," "The Friedman Unit," "It's All in the Plame," "The Armor We Went to War With," "Surging USA," and all the rest.

Will the lessons be heeded? Certainly, few of those who promoted the war based on false information have lost any standing in the media, even if they did lose respect from some in the audience. The Washington Post, for example, not only continued to carry columns by several regulars who had repeatedly misfired on the war -- and mocked anti-war critics -- but it even went out and hired Michael Gerson, President Bush's main speechwriter during the run-up to the invasion. William Kristol, one of the war's intellectual architects, kept his Time column, contributed Op-Eds to the Post, and didn't seem to lose any face time on TV -- then got a plum Op-Ed spot at The New York Times. The Post's editorial page, meanwhile, remained hawkish on the war through thick and thin, often contrary to virtually everything emerging in the paper's own news pages.

Will Rogers once said that the first thing you do when you find yourself in a hole is quit digging. In regard to the Iraq catastrophe, the media not only helped excavate the hole, it did not do nearly enough to help America dig out.