In freelancer Chris Mooney’s 6,000+-word article in the current Columbia Journalism Review, six leading U.S. newspapers come under scrutiny for the gullibility of their editorial pages in the run-up to the Iraqi war. While two of the newspapers opposed the war, writes Mooney, “If these papers had a major shortcoming, it was, instead, something they shared with the prowar pages to a much greater extent: a passive willingness to write about the Iraq debate on the president’s own terms.”
Later, Mooney writes,
Why did the papers trust and defer? For most of them, notes Todd Gitlin, a Columbia journalism professor, “the default position seems to have been that the administration was well meaning — and that there was a tight logical connection between admirable purpose and clear fact.”
Of the six papers – New York Times, Wall Street Journal, L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today and The Washington Post – The Post comes off as most introspective of its editorial stances.
[Editorial Page Editor Fred] Hiatt says he wishes the Post had not accepted the WMD claims during the days before war: “If you look at the editorials we write running up, we state as flat fact that he has stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. If that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it.” But Hiatt adds that he doesn’t feel hung out to dry by the administration — at least not yet. “If it turned out that Powell had deliberately lied to me, I would feel suckered,” he says
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