Post Regrets their Coverage of Major News Topic

Bully for Howard! The Post has at least one honest reporter.

Howard Kurtz reveals the Post's journalistic tactics to shape their coverage of the news. In this case, Kurtz reveals how the Post attempted to shape the public's pre war attitudes about Iraqi WMD by accepting uncritically administration claims and placing them prominently on the front page. Critics of the claims were buried on the middle of the paper or in the last few paragraphs of each article that are rarely read.

Sound familiar? Readers of this blog know the Post uses the very same journalistic tactics. Palestinian claims or articles that make Israel look bad are placed on the front page, while Israeli counter claims are buried in the bottom of the articles or at the back of the paper.

Here are some their practices.

The administration voice is placed on the first page.

"Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

"In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "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."


"The Doubts Go Inside

From August 2002 through the March 19, 2003, launch of the war, The Post ran more than 140 front-page stories that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq. Some examples: "Cheney Says Iraqi Strike Is Justified"; "War Cabinet Argues for Iraq Attack"; "Bush Tells United Nations It Must Stand Up to Hussein or U.S. Will"; "Bush Cites Urgent Iraqi Threat"; "Bush Tells Troops: Prepare for War."
Reporter Karen DeYoung, a former assistant managing editor who covered the prewar diplomacy, said contrary information sometimes got lost.
"If there's something I would do differently -- and it's always easy in hindsight -- the top of the story would say, 'We're going to war, we're going to war against evil.' But later down it would say, 'But some people are questioning it.' The caution and the questioning was buried underneath the drumbeat. . . . The hugeness of the war preparation story tended to drown out a lot of that stuff."

Read the entire article here to see the full ugly picture.