Paper issues mea culpa for prewar coverage
By SIMON HOUPT
Friday, August 13, 2004 - Page A11
NEW YORK -- The Washington Post yesterday joined the conga line of respected U.S. news organizations apologizing for flawed reporting in the runup to war in Iraq last year, publishing a front-page story by media reporter Howard Kurtz that called the paper's coverage "strikingly one-sided at times."
The article immediately became the focus of discussion among U.S. journalists, since the Post's coverage of the Bush administration's case for war had not been widely perceived as especially weak.
In his 3,000-word article, Mr. Kurtz said Post editors tended to relegate pieces that criticized the Bush administration's war plans and the rationale for invading Iraq to the back pages of the paper.
He quoted executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. as saying the Post was "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."
Assistant managing editor Bob Woodward told Mr. Kurtz that no journalist wanted to challenge the belief that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, in case weapons were later found. "I think it was part of the group-think."
The Post's unusual mea culpa follows publication in May of an extensive editor's note in The New York Times that said the paper had been too quick to believe claims about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Executive editor Bill Keller's note ran on an inside page. "Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper," he wrote.
Yesterday, Mr. Kurtz said the genesis of his piece was different. He told the on-line edition of the trade magazine Editor & Publisher that he had assigned it to himself, and said it met with no meddling from the paper's editors.
The articles follow months of criticism from those who say the U.S. news media were too willing to publish faulty information supplied by administration allies.
In an on-line chat session yesterday, Mr. Kurtz noted that stories about Iraq's purported possession of banned weapons were particularly hard to report. "You couldn't go to Iraq . . . you had to rely on sources, many of whom couldn't go on the record and all of whom were relying on shadowy intelligence," he wrote. "That doesn't excuse the shortcomings of the media in general and The Post in particular, but this was not easy stuff."
Mr. Kurtz said it was beyond the paper's abilities to determine whether the administration's claims were true. "We couldn't have definitively settled the question," he wrote. "We could have done a better job of questioning the administration's evidence and given greater prominence to those with minority views."
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