Miller was embedded with the high-profile WMD military search team, Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha, which was combing Iraq looking for the same weapons Miller had spent so much of 2002 hyping. Being embedded with MET Alpha -- the best seat in the house -- and being the first reporter to break the worldwide news when MET Alpha found the WMDs was going to be Miller's victory lap, and likely lock up her second Pulitzer Prize in three years. And on April 21, it all seemed to come together when Miller filed her biggest post-invasion scoop: "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." In it, she reported MET Alpha had hit the trifecta in the sands of Iraq when it located a scientist who said he worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade and that: (a) He'd "led Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the building blocks of illegal weapons." (b) He insisted Saddam had destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment just days before the war began. (c) And Saddam had also ferried lots of WMDs into Syria for safekeeping, which explained why U.S. forces couldn't find them. In case readers missed the implications, Miller reported that the scientist's allegation "supports the Bush administration's charges that Iraq continued to develop those weapons and lied to the United Nations about it." Indeed, the scientist represented the answer to anxious White House prayers.
But when readers delved deeper into the story, Miller's account became more peculiar as she revealed that she had no independent confirmation on any of the information; it was all relayed to her by MET Alpha commanders. That's because Miller was never told the scientist's name, she could not confirm he was a scientist, she was not allowed to interview him, and she was not allowed to visit his home. She was, however, allowed to look at him, from a distance, and watch as he "pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried." Additionally, Miller agreed not to write about the scientist and his claims for three days while military officials read over her story and okayed it for publication. In other words, military officials provided Miller with a string of exclusive and extraordinary WMD revelations via the scientist. Miller then typed the information up and military officials double-checked it to make sure she got everything right. The next day, appearing on PBS, Miller hyped the scientist's story even harder, suggesting he was better than a "smoking gun" of Saddam's WMD arsenal. To Miller, the alleged scientist was "a silver bullet in the form of a person." (Reporter James Moore noted that during the same PBS appearance Miller referred to scientists, plural, whom the MET Alpha team had found; her article referred only to a single mysterious scientist.)
Like Bush's infamous March 6 press conference, Miller's MET Alpha article should be studied and dissected in journalism schools for years to come. The fact that it was printed as is, with no independent verification of any kind, on the front page of the New York Times was stunning. But in retrospect, the "wacky-assed piece," as one anonymous Timesman famously dubbed it, served a very useful purpose -- it illustrated just how dramatically the wartime mind-set among top Times editors had shifted, to the point where they thought that kind of trust-me brand of journalism was acceptable. (It's ironic: During the Clinton years, high-profile reporters at the Times cut journalism corners writing dubious Whitewater stories that embarrassed the White House. But during the Bush years, Times reporters cut journalism corners writing dubious WMD stories that aided the White House.)
Needless to say, the scientist's claims championed by Miller were never verified, and the United States' handpicked weapons inspector -- and war supporter -- David Kay, concluded the WMDs were nowhere to be found. Or as Kay put it, "There were no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction at the time of the war." In 2005 Miller did concede her WMD articles failed to hold up, but Miller insisted everyone else got it wrong, too: "W.M.D. -- I got it totally wrong. The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong."
But other reporters found the right sources prior to the war. Knight Ridder's Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay wrote in October 2002 about a "bitter feud over secret intelligence" that was unfolding between the CIA and Bush administration appointees at the Pentagon who were pushing for the war rationale. "The dispute," they wrote, "pits hardliners long distrustful of the U.S. intelligence community, against professional military and intelligence officers who fear the hawks are shaping intelligence analyses to support their case for invading Iraq." Another Knight Ridder piece quoted an anonymous official who said "analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books." Miller never wrote those kinds of stories during the run-up to war. Instead of sparking debate over intelligence, she, along with the White House, seemed intent on snubbing it out.
Walter Pincus, the veteran national security reporter for the Washington Post, was another notable example. Prior to the war Pincus wrote a string of insightful articles about the type of intelligence the administration was leaning on to justify a preemptive war. Those stories included "Bush Clings To Dubious Allegations About Iraq," "U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms," "Alleged al-Qaida Ties Questioned; Experts Scrutinize Details of Accusations Against Iraqi Government," and "Making the Case Against Baghdad; Officials: Evidence Strong, Not Conclusive."
The only problem was, prior to the war Pincus's prophetic dispatches were routinely buried by his editors inside the Post's A section, on page 13, 16, 18, or 21. It wasn't until three months after the invasion when the elusive weapons of mass destruction could not be found that Post editors began to regularly feature Pincus's Iraq exposes on the front page. "[They] went through a whole phase in which they didn't put things on the front page that would make a difference," Pincus complained.
The same mind-set was on display at the New York Times; breathless scoops about Saddam's mighty arsenal were paraded on Page One, while insightful examinations about doubts surrounding prewar intelligence got buried. For instance, the Times's James Risen completed "C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports" days before the invasion began. Yet editors held the article for a week before finally publishing it on Page B10.
Given that reticence, it was not surprising that MSM outlets were so slow in admitting their prewar shortcomings. As early as July 2003, Slate media critic Jack Shafer, looking back on Miller's overexcited reporting, labeled it "wretched." The Times leadership, though, did nothing. Nine months later, in March 2004, the paper's public editor, badgered by readers asking that the paper hold itself accountable for its fraudulent reporting, asked executive editor Keller about the issue. In a dismissive response, he insisted there was no need to recant Miller's reporting, that she was a "fearless" journalist, that her critics basically didn't know what they were talking about, and that an internal review would simply "consume more of my attention than I was willing to invest." (During the run-up to war in 2002 and 2003 Keller worked as a Times columnist and wrote for the Sunday Times Magazine, where he supported the war and wrote glowingly of Paul Wolfowitz, then-deputy defense secretary and chief architect of the Iraq invasion.)
On May 26, 2004, the Times, without mentioning Miller by name, finally addressed the paper's faulty WMD reporting. In its "From the Editors" note, Times leaders conceded the reporting was "not as rigorous as it should have been." Keller, though, remained in a defensive crouch. "I don't see this as an apology," he told the Boston Globe the day the editors' note was published. "I see this as an explanation. It's not a note that's going to satisfy our most bloodthirsty critics." He stressed that while there may be a "small lynch mob of people who want to see someone strung up," it was time for the Times, "to move on" from the debate; to get past the annoying "distraction" of the paper's faulty WMD reporting. It was telling that the Times's "mini-culpa," as Shafer dubbed it, only appeared after the Times public editor tipped off the paper's leadership that he was going to investigate, and write about, the Times's prewar reporting. (He later called it "very bad journalism.")
Another year later, and now nearly thirty months after the invasion, the Times was still wrestling with the ghost of Miller's war reporting after she got dragged into court as part of the ongoing criminal investigation into which Bush White House insider leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the wife of a prominent Bush administration war critic. Miller stood her ground and served eighty-five days in jail rather than cooperate with prosecutors, a move the Times cheered from its editorial page. But when Miller emerged from prison only to announce she couldn't remember who leaked her the sensitive information (it was not Cheney's top aide, Scooter Libby, she insisted), nor could she recall why she had scribbled the name "Valerie Flame" in a notebook she brought back from a July 2003 meeting with Libby at the time Plame's name was being leaked by the White House, the notion that Miller had swapped her allegiance from the Times to the White House became impossible to ignore. Amid the unfolding scandal, which did deep damage to the newspaper's reputation, Keller addressed the staff in an October 21 memo and was forced, yet again, to circle back to the paper's faulty prewar reporting. "I wish we had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as I became executive editor [in July 2003]. At the time, we thought we had compelling reasons for kicking the issue down the road," Keller explained. "The paper had just been through a major trauma, the Jayson Blair episode, and needed to regain its equilibrium. It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors." (Blair was a young reporter who had duped Times editors into publishing scores of his fictitious news reports.) "I was trying to get my arms around a huge new job, appoint my team, get the paper fully back to normal, and I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction."
That's a plausible explanation. But there was likely another, unspoken, element in play -- Keller in 2003 simply didn't feel like he had to deal with the WMD controversy because the criticism mostly came from the left (i.e., the "small lynch mob"), and from the MSM perspective in 2003, antiwar critics did not have to be engaged, which was part of the larger media mind-set during the Bush years of ignoring their liberal critics.
But try to imagine a parallel universe where the WMD facts had been reversed. Imagine that Miller, playing up tips from Democrats and progressives, had been aggressively skeptical in her prewar reporting about administration claims about Saddam's WMDs, and that time and again her editors gave Miller's pro-peace-flavored dispatches pageone placement. But then months after the invasion, U.S. troops uncovered WMD stockpiles bigger and deadlier than even the administration officials had claimed. At that point right-wing press critics like Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, and the team at the Weekly Standard would have declared war on the Times, accusing the paper of undermining the president, putting the nation at risk, and being driven by a blind liberal bias. The notion that, beset with those kinds of outside political attacks, editor Keller would have kicked the Miller controversy down the road for a year or more because it would have been too messy to deal with is just not believable. Instead, following an immediate internal review, Miller likely would have been quietly relieved from the paper within six months of the invasion. In reality though, Times leadership, for nearly two years, did not treat criticism of Miller's reporting seriously. In fact, if it hadn't been for the subpoena power of Fitzgerald, whose investigation cast the spotlight on the Times's regrettable prewar performance, it's doubtful the paper, based on its halfhearted effort at self-examination in 2004, would have ever come clean.
The Times WMD embarrassment was not an isolated incident. In fact, it fit into a larger pattern that the paper's leaders refused to address, let alone fix. Just as with its dishonest Whitewater coverage in the 1990s and its misleading coverage of Wen Ho Lee, the scientist inside the Los Alamos National Laboratory who was wrongly charged with espionage, a charge the Times hyped relentlessly, the paper continued to let itself be used by partisan Republicans who were planting and pushing phony stories for political advantage. During the Clinton years the fantastic tales -- Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee -- were designed to embarrass a Democratic president. During the Bush years the fantastic tale about WMDs was designed to help start a war. In each case the Times, anxious to shed its "liberal media" tag, fell for the ploy, promoted the false stories, and did severe damage to the newspaper's reputation in the process.
Both the press and the White House were guilty of hyping the WMDs' existence, and both often avoided taking a serious look back. Unless, of course, it was to look back and have a good laugh together about the administration's fruitless hunt. The backslapping occurred on March 24, 2004, at the annual black-tie dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association, held at the Washington Hilton. The eagerly anticipated social event attracted a media-saturated crowd of approximately 1,500 people who were treated to a tongue-in-cheek address from Bush. Tradition held that sitting presidents took the opportunity at the Correspondents dinner to poke fun at the press as well as themselves. Bush did just that during his ten-minute, professionally written monologue, delivering some topical zingers: "'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.' My Cabinet could take some pointers from watching that show. In fact, I'm going to have the Fab Five do a makeover on [Attorney General John] Ashcroft."
Then Bush turned to the "White House Election-Year Album," as photos flashed on the screen behind his podium. One showed Bush gazing out an oval office window as he provided the narration: "Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere!" The audience laughed. Then came a picture of Bush on his hands and knees peering under White House furniture. "Nope, no weapons over there!" The MSM audience laughed harder. And then came a snapshot of Bush searching behind the drapes. "Maybe under here?" The audience roared in approval -- Bush couldn't find the WMDs!
The next morning, newspaper reporters who laughed out loud themselves at the Correspondents dinner dutifully typed up the jokes. It wasn't until some Democratic members of Congress, along with parents whose children had been killed in Iraq, expressed their disgust that it dawned on some members of the MSM that Bush's jokes might be considered offensive. Even after objections were raised the MSM rallied around Bush arguing the jokes were no big deal. In fact, it was telling how the MSM were reading off the exact same talking points as the Bush supporters in the right-wing press. Their mutual message was simple -- lighten up! On National Review Online, conservative talk show host Michael Graham, who attended the Correspondents dinner, mocked the critics: "Somehow, over the past 30 years, liberalism has mutated into something akin to an anti-comedy vaccine. The more you're Left, the less you laugh."
The supposedly liberal Los Angeles Times completely agreed. In an unsigned editorial, the paper belittled Democrats and anyone else who had the nerve to question Bush's sense of wartime humor, or daring to question Beltway tradition: "The truly serious thing about what's known as Washington's 'Silly Season' is whether presidents rise to the challenge." On Fox News, there was heated agreement between Sunday News anchor Chris Wallace and the network's Washington bureau managing editor, Brit Hume, that Bush's WMD jokes were perfectly acceptable.
Wallace: "I still think it's funny."
Hume: "I thought it was a good-natured performance."
But what about Fox liberal Juan Williams? He also had no patience for the Bush critics upset about the jokes: "I think people are petty in the situation."
Washington Post news reporter and Fox panelist Ceci Connelly concurred: "The pictures were funny. I laughed at the photos."
To his credit, MSNBC's Chris Matthews was among the few Beltway celebrity pundits who separated from the pack and expressed real resentment over the poor taste displayed by Bush and his press apologists: "I wonder if they're spending a day at Walter Reed Hospital with all the guys who had limbs amputated and brain injuries and things like that, how funny they think it is that the reason they were given for fighting this war is now the butt of humor by their commander in chief."
The MSM's meek performance prior to the war did not spring out of a vacuum -- the WMD charade, the mad rush to quote government sources, and the knee-jerk attempt to undermine and ignore administration critics. It was all telegraphed in the wake of 9/11 and through the early stages of the press's deferential War on Terror coverage, which worked full-time to portray Bush as a savvy wartime president. Those efforts didn't come any more devoted than Washington Post's 2002 eight-piece series, "10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet," in which reporters Bob Woodward and Dan Balz were given extraordinary access to the White House and in exchange explained away lingering questions about Bush's response to 9/11, like why he spent that day flying around the country instead of returning to the capitol, and why it was his flack Karen Hughes who first addressed the nation and took questions that traumatic day, not Bush or Cheney. The duo also covered up for the White House regarding its phony cover story that a coded message had come in on 9/11 indicating Air Force One was a terrorist target.
Conservative pundits cheered the series, suggesting it was a Pulitzer Prize must-win. Raves from the right were understandable. To say the series presented the administration, and Bush in particular, in a favorable light would be an understatement. Readers saw Bush utterly sure of himself, operating on gut instincts, leading roundtable discussions, formulating complex strategies, asking pointed questions, building international coalitions, demanding results, poring over speeches, and seeking last-minute phrase changes.
The portrait was so contrary to the public's previous perception of the president that it was reminiscent of the classic "Saturday Night Live" sketch that ran at the height of the Iran-Contra scandal and featured an outwardly jolly and oblivious Ronald Reagan, who in private Oval Office meetings revealed himself as a mastermind of the complicated arms-for-hostage operation, barking out orders to befuddled cabinet members. In the same way, but without satire, the Post series suggested that a president often depicted prior to 9/11 as a genial delegator of duties, who ducked the Vietnam War with a stateside post in the Texas Air National Guard, was in fact a natural, hands-on commander in chief of the War on Terror.
From the ubiquitous flag pin lapels for anchor men and women and the stirring news team theme music to the permanent terror alert logos sketched into the corner of television screens, the MSM broadcast their allegiance. It was CBS anchor Dan Rather, on September 17, 2001, declaring, "George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions. Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where. And he'll make the call."
Twenty months after announcing he'd take orders from Bush, Rather, as the war in Iraq unfolded, made another public proclamation: "Look, I'm an American. And when my country is at war, I want my country to win, whatever the definition of 'win' may be. Now, I can't and don't argue that that is coverage without a prejudice. About that I am prejudiced." NBC's Brian Williams called it "the 9/11 syndrome," or "guilty of settling in to too comfortable a journalistic pattern." Some outside the MSM likely preferred the phrase "dictation." It was the kind of pronounced and prolonged presidential press reverence likely not seen in this country in half a century.
Next page: The media paved the way to war by whipping up hysteria about "terror"