In a story last month about how the small town of Madison, Va., might cope with a sudden influx of suburban Washingtonians fleeing a terrorist attack, one of the accompanying photographs showed a sign in a shop window advertising a rally to “Support Our Troops.” The photo caption said, “Support for President Bush runs high in the once heavily Democratic town.” A reader called to point out what she said was a small but annoying problem. She felt that the combination of photo and caption reinforced a false and dangerous notion that the media should guard against promoting: that opposition to the war and to President Bush’s policies implies a lack of support for American troops in battle.
The story did point out that support for Bush runs high in Madison, so the caption conveyed information that was in the story. Nevertheless, I thought the caller’s “small” observation was reflective of a larger issue: whether criticism and dissent, two essential American freedoms, are coming under unchallenged attack in the name of patriotism, and whether the press is doing enough to report the issue as well as the events. The events run from official public criticism of retired military leaders, and some active-duty officers, who raised concerns at a time in the war when supply lines lengthened and resistance by unconventional Iraqi forces stiffened, to actions taken against the Dixie Chicks after the group’s lead singer criticized the president before the war began.
Now that the war is over, a lot of attention is being paid to how well the press covered it and how the Pentagon’s policy of “embedding” reporters with military units worked. In general, I thought the country’s major news organizations performed well and the embedding process was a success. As a reader of The Post, I thought this newspaper did exceptionally well, and my mail suggests many readers agree.
The Post poured a lot of experienced people and resources into the coverage, so readers got a pretty good picture of what was happening every day. Several other large news organizations did the same. But The Post had nine reporters embedded with different military units; an Arabic-speaking reporter in Baghdad; several other reporters roaming on their own, some at considerable risk, elsewhere in Iraq and in surrounding countries; and experienced reporters in Washington to provide additional reporting, context and analysis. Whatever shortcomings existed in the embedding process in terms of having only a narrow view of one unit, or of not being able to assess the impact on Iraqis, were overcome by the larger commitment.
The one place The Post fell down was in providing its own combat photography. The Post has one of the country’s best collections of news photographers. But the photo chief, in a brave but ultimately losing gamble on independence over embedding, lost a front-row seat on the action.
There is still, undoubtedly, much that we don’t know that may take a while to surface. But for my money, a more interesting and useful analysis for news organizations generally would be one of how the press performed before the war began. There is hardly any bigger decision than going to war, and this war was an unusual and controversial one.
It was 15 months from the time Osama bin Laden apparently slipped away during the offensive on Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December 2001 until Saddam Hussein may have slipped away during the first U.S. bombing of Iraq in March 2003. Did the press catch on early enough to the administration’s switch of focus from Afghanistan to Iraq? Was it slow to sense that while there was little or no public dissent over the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and the Taliban, there was wider and growing dissent over a war in Iraq? Was it slow to record that dissent and to give it prominence, considering the stakes? Did the press report, probe and challenge the administration’s case about weapons of mass destruction, or its shifting rationales for the war, with sufficient vigor? Did it buy into official language, everything from “coalition forces” to “Operation Iraqi Freedom” to “weapons of mass destruction”? Did it press hard enough on the claimed linkages of Hussein to 9/11 and on the question of whether intelligence had been politicized? Did it pull any punches in the post-9/11 world in carrying out its patriotic duty to press institutions to account for their statements and actions, wherever the story led?
