Dereliction on the Part of Media

The crunch question is: how did the Democrats in Congress and the American media let the Bush administration double-time march the nation to war, especially as Bush, Vice-President Cheney and Defence Secretary Rumsfeld ignored the advice, dissent and warnings of so many experts in their own government?

One of the main reasons was the hidden power of something Bush said immediately after 9/11: “If you are not with us you are against us”. Few realised at the time how insidious this apparently simple statement was. Almost immediately even to question or express doubt about any part of the administration policy was seen to be “against” it and therefore unpatriotic. There could be no debate, no scepticism, and no discussion.

The major media, whose job should be to force the government to explain itself, suddenly decided that the President’s exhortation applied to it too, and got on side. The then Director-General of the BBC, Greg Dyke, said he was shocked at the way the broadcast media in the United States “wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality”.

The New York Times and the Washington Post were no exception and supported the administration all the way. But it now emerges that there were some sections of the media that refused to be pressed into government service and reported critically — even when the bigger and better-known news organisations were reporting the opposite.

One of them was honoured at the Washington Newseum recently. John Walcott, the Washington bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, was awarded the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence for his Knight-Ridder bureau’s coverage of the run-up to the war in Iraq. (It was the late I. F. Stone, proprietor of an independent weekly, who once said, “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should ever be believed.”)

In his acceptance speech, Walcott sought to put his finger on what went wrong with the media as the government moved towards the invasion of Iraq. Reporters were in a too cozy relationship with the government. “Being an outside, a muckraker, isn’t as much fun as being an insider, a celebrity journalist on the TV and lecture circuit. But there were bigger problems than just a too cozy relationship with the wrong sources and timidity about challenging a popular president in the wake of an attack on us all.

“There was simple laziness. Much of what the Bush Administration said, especially about Iraq and Al Qaeda, made no sense, yet few reporters bothered to check it out. They were stenographers; they were not reporters. Ahmad Chalabi is an intelligent man, but many of the stories he spun [in favour of the war] made no sense. Yet very few reporters checked out their stories. Too many ran with what they were handed. Instead they handed bullhorns to people who already had megaphones.”

Walcott said some of his colleagues have cited the fact that Democrats in Congress had failed to challenge the administration on Iraq as a reason for their lapses but the Democrats’ dereliction of duty did not explain the journalists’ own dereliction, much less excuse it.

“Finally, the most highly regarded news organisations in the country, led by the New York Times and the editorial page of the Washington Post, were wrong about Iraq, and too many others simply followed them, like lemmings, over the cliff.”

Walcott was not optimistic that in similar circumstances the same mistakes would not be repeated. He pointed out that concentration in the news business was getting worse not better. Only a handful of news organizations — The Times, the Post, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press and McClatchy — still maintained significant foreign news operations.

Other newspapers and major television networks had abandoned their foreign bureaus and were cutting back in Washington.

“We’ve reached a point, I fear, where the journalism of I.F. Stone is now very much at risk from a combination of economic, technological, political and philosophical developments,” he said. Dire words but, I fear, justified.

Phillip Knightley is a veteran British 
journalist and commentator