Page 76 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

66 Chapter 3

chosen to do so. The dramatic difference in coverage between Knight Ridder
and other corporate sources, then, reflected a conscious choice to emphasize and
favor certain intelligence sources over others. This conscious choice, however,
should not be overemphasized to the point of neglecting institutional factors.
Elite newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles
Times-all closer to centers of American political and economic power than
news services catering to secondary newspaper markets-were clearly under
more pressure to comply with WMD related government propaganda. As
Landay himself admitted, "I don't think people really cared [about his critical
reporting of WMD] as long as it wasn't having an impact here politically, then
we could write what we wanted. If it had been in the New York Times or the
Washington Post, then you would have seen a whole different rea~tion."~'
Media critics increasingly blamed the press for perceived failures when it
came to preventing the invasion of Iraq, or simply in educating the American
public over the possible drawbacks of going to war. One study released in mid
2004 by the Center for International Security Studies and the University of
Maryland found that "many stories [before the war] stenographically reported
the incumbent administration's perspectives on WMD, giving too little critical
examination of the way officials framed the events, issues, threats, and policy
options" leading up to war. The study concluded that there were three major
faults in pre-war coverage: 1. there was a shortage of stories questioning the
"official line" regarding Iraqi WMD; 2. journalists overwhelmingly accepted the
attempts to link Iraq to A1 Qaeda when it came to the WMD "threat"; and 3. the
mainstream media too often portrayed Iraq's alleged WMD as a "monolithic
menace," failing to distinguish between different types of weapons and the
dangers (or lack thereof) that each weapon posed to the U.S. John Steinbruner,
the author of the report's foreword, argued concerning media coverage that,
"The American media did not play the role of checking and balancing the
exercise of power that the standard theory of democracy requiresTd8

Judith Miller:
An Isolated Case, or a Role Model for a Generation?
For the New York Times, a newspaper that continuously proclaims its
journalistic integrity by reporting "All the news that's fit to print," Judith Miller
was the type of journalist that got the stories they wanted--despite what often
amounted to a lack of range in sources when covering the WMD issue. Judith
Miller covered extensively and in most cases exclusively on the WMD charges
for the New York Times during the Bush administration's push for war.
However, there was one major problem-her sources for information.
Judith Miller started writing for the New York Times in 1977 when the paper
wanted "a new breed of hungry young hires" in part due to "losing" the main
coverage of the Watergate Scandal to Bob Woodward and the Washington
In an attempt to separate themselves from the CIA-Valerie Plame scandal
surrounding Judith Miller, many at the New York Times attacked her personally.