NEW STUDY FAULTS MEDIA WMD CREDULITY
22 March 2004

A new study conducted by the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, entitled "Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction", finds fault with the deferential nature of mainstream journalism surrounding the Iraq WMD debate, prior to the war. The authors find that political bias was less instrumental than was industry convention, which in some cases appears to have dissuaded active criticism of facts not supported by strong evidence.

The primary criticism was directed at an apparent willingness to accept the official interpretation of events as representing the most authoritative or advanced thinking on the subject. Official press releases were essentially reproduced across national media with little critical reporting or investigation being brought to the story. Taking the dispersal-sans-critique analysis further, it is evident that the media (perhaps for reasons of perceived time-constraint or headline-space-limitation) fostered a widespread belief in a "monolithic menace" of WMD.

In this climate, it was not unusual for readers to come away with the feeling that allegations of activities which might be related to chemical research, potentially for weapons purposes, would immediately be linked to the threat of a nuclear "mushroom cloud". In the days just prior to the first strikes of the war, top officials reiterated this ominous warning of the "mushroom cloud", with an essentially unimpressed corps of journalists choosing to quote rather than to criticize.

With the finding that journalists on the whole failed to adequately check the exercise of executive power, it would appear that the Fourth Estate failed partly because it mimicked the Congress, which took at face value a line of reasoning not supported by facts. That reasoning, as inspectors Blix and Al Baradei have pointed out, insisted that if there was no hard proof of the dismantling and abandonment of WMD, then that absence of proof was in itself concrete proof of the opposite.

While such logic offers a neat evidentiary formula, there is clearly no sound basis for believing that such logic is infallible. Yet the crisis in public debate that occurred as inflated or misguided intelligence was distributed to the Congress, to the Press and the UN, is based in precisely that assumption. Even as the argument was made that Hussein was an unpredictable madman, it was assumed by virtually all that his WMD activities would be entirely predictable and easy to define.

Not only did the scant evidence of ongoing programs lead the Vice President to assert his certainty that Hussein "has reconstituted nuclear weapons" but also the to rain of flowers theory often propagated by the Secretary of Defense. Mr. Rumsfeld, while posing as a hard-edged realist, unwilling to assume the best about suspicous characters, was given to claiming that American troops would be welcomed with cheers and open arms, specifically asserting that tanks would be showered by rain of flowers as they entered Baghdad. This also, perhaps for its rosy outlook, was often cited as a guiding argument in favor of the war, while few reports emerged suggesting that a broad network of armed resistance might arise.

The theory of inevitability also appears to have played a key role in the widespread disinterested relay of information which replaced the normal activity of concentrated fact-checking and evidentiary reportage. Anecdotal reports suggest that from the summer of 2002, many journalists were convinced by what they saw in troop mobilization and administration rhetoric that the war was a forgone conclusion, that there was essentially no eventuality that would prevent the invasion, and so they set about writing stories which would frame and contextualize the logic behind the invasion, without attempting to dissect the arguments, as if it was the thinking of the administration which was the story, and not the worthiness of that thinking.

Especially important is the mention of individual journalists cited for their efforts to provide investigative background and critical thinking, in their reporting of events and claims. [For more: E&P]