News

'Will They Ever Learn? The Media & The Iraq War'

October 16, 2009

By Dan Fastenberg '10

Last night, the Journalism School hosted an all-class lecture devoted to the pitfalls of press coverage of the Iraq War and how this reporting can be improved.

Weighing in were Leslie H. Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former The New York Times columnist; Michael Getler, PBS's ombudsman; and Michael Massing, a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Dean Nicholas Lemann, the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, served as moderator.

The panellists agreed that the press fell far short in its job of holding policymakers accountable when the decision to invade Iraq had been made.

"If the press doesn’t do the job, no one else will do it," said Gelb, who also served in the State Department as an assistant secretary of state under Jimmy Carter. "It doesn’t mean that it can stop wars, but it’s the best chance."

Gelb excoriated the U.S. Congress for its failure to adequately fulfill its role as a check on the executive branch. He referred to the bicameral body as a "backwater" long removed from the days of dignified debate made famous by senators like William Fulbright, whose questioning of the rationale for Vietnam War proved critical in the anti-war movement. Gelb also did not spare from his critique the think tank world he has long played a leading role in, calling the whole lot highly partisan divided along ideological lines. Nor did he excuse himself, offering "political" reasons among the foreign policy establishment as an explanation for his initial support for the war.

Lemann added that in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 and the anthrax attacks it was considered to be "wacko" among the foreign policy establishment to be opposed to the war during the run-up.

The New York Times and The Washington Post received the most intense scrutiny, and the four speakers took measure of how the two lions of the journalism world fared during what Getler referred to as the second time in 40 years that the country went to war under false pretenses.

According to Getler, the particular shortcomings at the Washington Post centered around editorial decisions, not reporting. Probing analyses into specious administration claims like the link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein did appear in the Post, but only in the inside pages, said Getler, who served as the Post’s ombudsman from 2000 to 2005. He also singled out insufficient coverage of the 2003 anti-war protests, and said that the year’s largest anti-war march in the nation’s capital was only covered through the paper’s metro section.

The Times did receive credit from the panel for having given adequate coverage of events, such as damning anti-war speeches delivered on the Senate floor by Robert Byrd (D-WV) and the late Ted Kennedy. However, the Times was nevertheless characterized by Getler as having played a de facto contributing role in the administration’s march to war for its validation of the White House’s weapons of mass destruction narrative. The most famous instance of such an assist came in a Sept. 8, 2002 Times story co-authored by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon titled "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,"which concurred with the White House contention that Hussein was seeking to purchase the now infamous "aluminum tubes" to further his alleged weapons program.

Soon after the story was released, administration officials were pointing to the Times story to back up their claims during television appearances, Getler said.

With the Obama administration facing its own slew of battlefronts, the panelists implored all journalists to take coverage of matters relating to war and peace with the utmost seriousness, and to fully probe the context of stories that might divert from the party line.

Dan Fastenberg ’05 was an intern at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2006. He regularly reports for the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Web site. He hopes to work for a television news magazine program.