Page 75 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

Weapons of Mass Diversion

Weapons of Mass Distraction:
Media Mouthpiece to War

Despite consistent and adamant claims from the Bush Administration and the
media that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the
United States could not find any such weapons after months of searching
subsequent to the invasion of Iraq. Iraq's supposed possession of WMD was the
main reason provided by the White House and the media for the necessity of the
invasion, even though there were a number of reputable individuals and agencies
that spoke up and criticized such claims. As these figures (Mohammad
ElBaradei, Hans Blix, and Scott Ritter, to name a few) continually reiterated that
they had found no imminent Iraqi threat to the U.S. or any other country, the
Bush administration continued to gain popular support for its invasion and
occupation, aided by sympathetic media coverage.
Not all mainstream media organizations accepted the Iraqi "threat,"
however. Michael Massing of the New York Review of Books criticized what he
saw as a case of media groupthink over the issue of WMD: "One of the most
entrenched and disturbing features of American journalism [is] its pack
mentality. Editors and journalists don't like to diverge too sharply from what
everyone else is writing."35
Not all reporters uncritically subscribed to group think concerning the
WMD "threat." The Knight Ridder news service, for one, reacted quite
skeptically to the WMD claims, suggesting that Iraq was not a security threat to
the U.S. Prominent reporters for the paper, including Jonathan Landay and
Warren Strobel, ran critical stories regarding the alleged Iraqi menace. Part of
the reason for Knight Ridder's distrust for the administration's claims was
because the news outfit was more reliant on lower-level intelligence, rather than
on sources at the highest levels of government and the intelligence community.
Warren Strobel explains that

we had a lot of sources in the bowels of government, and they were telling us a
different story, and we chose to believe them rather than the administration's
public statements. They were, in many cases, skilled people who either knew
the Middle East region, or knew intelligence, or knew WMD issues, and they
were saying that the case the administration was making was not true or that
they had real problems with the intelligence that they were seeing, and that it
didn't add up to the case for war that the administration was making. They
were credible people.36

These credible witnesses, however, were not considered enough for most
mainstream reporters or news organizations, which were more content to take
the Bush administration and high-level official claims at face value, rather than
engaging in critical, investigative reporting based upon a wide variety of
sources.
Strobel's acknowledgement that there were credible experts who disputed
the WMD threat is important because it shows that there were other ways in
which mainstream media outfits could have reported the issue, should they have