J School Chiefs Factchecked

When asked recently to answer some
questions about Iraq War coverage for an article
in the San Francisco Chronicle, my instincts as an analyst for Accuracy in Media
told me to be careful. Obviously, we know how people can be burned by the media.
But we also try to work with the media, especially those who are supposed to
offer intelligent critiques of media performance on various issues.

I
offered to provide my answers in writing, providing a documented record of what
was said to whom. Coverage of this exchange demonstrates how the media decide
what they want to report in advance, and exclude information that contradicts
their thesis. I was right in the middle of this one.

I
answered all of the questions put forth by Matthew Stannard, and while I was
accurately quoted, he left out what I considered by far my more important
points. This is bias by omission. I will explain and expand on these points in
this commentary.

As someone who has produced and
directed documentaries and news magazine shows, I understand the danger of
leaving most or all of interviews on the cutting room floor. Sometimes the
material that is excluded is not critical to the piece. In this case, however,
my points went directly to challenging the overriding theme of Stannard’s
article.

About half of the article was on the
issue of how questioning, or accepting, the media were of claims by the Bush
administration in the run-up to the war, which began in March 2003. The
overwhelming view by those interviewed was that the media had been too willing
to believe what the Bush administration was telling them. This is one of the
prominent themes of the Stannard article. But it has become
stale.

According to one of the so-called
experts, Theodore Glasser, of Stanford University’s Graduate School of
Journalism, “The press treated the war at the beginning the way the press
treated other wars at the beginning, and that was: There’s nothing to discuss.
We’re off to war,” Added Glasser: “There was no debate among Democrats and
Republicans (about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) therefore there was no debate in the press. The press has always had a hard time covering debate outside the mainstream.”

According to Thomas Kunkel, dean of
the Journalism school at the University of Maryland, there was a lack of critical
coverage in the run-up to the war, but it wasn’t much different than in previous
conflicts.

I argued that in fact there was plenty of questioning on whether or not we should
have led the invasion of Iraq, particularly as the U.S. and Britain
unsuccessfully attempted to get France, Germany, Russia and China to go along
with one more U.N. Security Council resolution in the months prior to the start
of the war. Months went by as the Bush Administration prepared for war.

The U.S. went to war for various reasons, including
that Iraq had a documented history of
military aggression, and that it was developing and had used weapons of mass
destruction (WMD). Iraq had invaded two neighbors, gassed its own people, and created killing fields with hundreds of thousands of
dead Iraqis.

The current claim is that “Bush lied”
about Iraqi WMD, but the fact is that U.S. intelligence, and the intelligence
agencies of every other major country, believed that Iraq possessed Weapons of
Mass Destruction that were forbidden under a series of 16 U.N. resolutions. We
also know, despite claims to the contrary from Joseph Wilson, that Saddam had
been trying to purchase the type of uranium that could be enriched to make
nuclear weapons. He had also harbored and aided the worst and most ruthless
terrorists in the world, including al-Qaeda operatives.

In the end, when President Bush and
the U.N. gave Saddam one last chance to come clean, U.N. Security Council
resolution 1441, he decided to ignore the world. We now know that he was
counting on bribes to members of the U.N. Security Council to eventually lift
economic sanctions against his regime. His strategy was working–until the U.S.and our allies invaded and overthrew him.

Under these circumstances, if Bush
had NOT acted against Saddam Hussein, especially after 9/11, he could have been
accused of putting U.S national security at
risk.

We have offered some of the evidence
in past commentaries of examples of distorted
media coverage today of the run-up to the war. But the notion that “Bush lied”
about WMD is also being challenged by new evidence out of Iraq.

For example, this article
from FrontPageMag describes what we have been finding out from reading documents
that have been captured since liberating Iraq
from Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule. Former Senator and 9/11 commissioner Bob
Kerrey calls the findings a “very
significant set of facts.”

Andrew McCarthy, the former federal
prosecutor who successfully led the prosecution of the first World Trade Center
bombers, has written about the evidence showing both that Saddam was trying to
purchase uranium from Africa, and the links between Saddam and al Qaeda in an article
for National Review online. McCarthy is critical of the Bush administration for
failing to embrace this information to help rebuild support at home for the war
in which we are engaged.

This comes on the heels of the book
Saddam’s
Secrets, co-written by Jim Nelson Black, a great researcher and author with
whom I recently spent time, and General Georges Sada, one of Saddam’s top
military advisors, who documents Saddam’s efforts to get his WMD out of the
country shortly before the war began.

So the real story is not that the
media didn’t do their jobs in the months before the war. The story is that the
media are failing to do their jobs now, after evidence has emerged of Saddam’s
WMD programs and ties to the terrorists who hit us on 9/11.

The media do not want to admit that
Bush was right after all.

Now, if Bush would only make this
case in his own defense. This will involve confronting¯not courting¯the media.

Roger Aronoff is an editor and writer with Accuracy in Media, Accuracy in Academia’s parent group. He produced the award-winning documentary, Confronting Iraq.