Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[seabass]

>>>First random article from February 2003 in the NY Times with search "War" and "Iraq" in headline is an anti-war piece.<<<


You can produce anything you want with "random". I'll do objective if you don't mind which reveals that both the NYT and the Washington Post drummed up so much support for Bush going to war they actually had to apologize in public later.


"The Washington Post on Thursday joined the venerable New York Times in conceding that it got taken in by the Bush administration's rationale for the war in Iraq without challenging the case, especially on the weapons of mass destruction issue.

In a page one story by its own media correspondent Howard Kurtz, the paper's executive editor Leonard Downie said, "We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."

In an astonishing insider account, Kurtz quoted fellow reporter and Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks as saying, "There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/812615.cms



"But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.

The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/international/middleeast/26FTE_NOTE.html?ex=1400990400&en=94c1...