PressEthic

A segment on NPR's weekly media criticism show, On The Media, addressed a huge topic, an elephant in the room that should be discussed extensively both in the public and within press circles. Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, interviewed two reporters from McClatchy Newspapers, John Walcott and Warren Strobel about reporting on the runup to war in Iraq and a possible war in Iran. All three express concerns about repeating the mistakes they identify with the coverage before the Iraq war began. Strobel says he thinks one of the media's failures was that the preparation for coverage of the war overshadowed the reporting on the decision to go to war:

We were all getting ready to cover a war that had a sense of inevitability about it. I have to wonder whether it's going to be different this time. Let's say the Bush Administration does start doing more overt things that look like they're going to attack Iran, I have a feeling and a fear that the news media will do what it sort of has to do by its institutional nature, which is to just gear up to cover another conflict.

Jurkowitz characterizes Walcott's coverage in the lead-up to the war in Iraq as, "widely praised by press critics for being among the very few mainstream news reporters who did report on the debate within the intelligence community." Walcott responds that he simply took a different tack:

What we did is we made a conscious, or at least semiconscious decision that we were going to put faith in what the professional diplomats, military officers and intelligence analysts were saying more than what the Administration was saying, people at the middle levels of government, what my boss, John Walcott, calls the "blue-collar sources." I think, without naming names, what most of the other media did was to put most of the emphasis on what Rice and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush were saying, and then in the tenth or eighth paragraph of a story put in a couple of paragraphs about dissent or questioning elsewhere in the Administration.

Both Wollcott and Strobel maintain that the Bush administration's notorious "message discipline" is not fading, despite the greater frequency of leaks since the president's reelection. According to Strobel, the administration is more on message than ever:

I think what you see is on the outside, with your retired generals, members of Congress, people outside the Administration, they're more willing to speak up now. Maybe even occasionally some actual active-duty officers are a little bit more willing to speak up. But I have to say within the Administration itself, I'm finding that in some senses the second term is even more difficult than the first term. And the reason for that is in the first term, there were policy wars going on between the Pentagon and the White House on one side, and on the other side, the State Department and the CIA, and it was usually possible to talk to one side or the other and to get information. In this Administration, and especially with Condoleeza Rice, the Secretary of State, they've imposed even more message discipline.

At least Walcott is optimistic that this time journalists will look to compensate (or even overcompensate) for their lax approach before Iraq, taking a more active approach to covering the escalating tensions:

And I think there's a determination this time to be a little bit more aggressive, to be a little bit more suspicious about what the Administration says, to be a little bit more questioning about where they are headed.

There are so many frameworks through which to compare the coverage of international conflicts, especially with the recent developments in North Korea's nuclear capabilities. With that taking some of the attention off the Middle East, it's easy to forget that only ten days ago military action against Iran seemed so likely. It would be nice to see outlets like On The Media others discuss the coverage in depth, while the lessons of past errors are still fresh in our minds.