Posted on 05/30/2004 11:18:04 AM PDT by O.C. - Old Cracker
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Institutional failures at The New York Times led to it being used in a "cunning campaign" by those who wanted the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the paper's ombudsman said on Sunday. Daniel Okrent, who has the title "public editor," wrote in a scathing review of the paper's coverage of the weapons issue ahead of the Iraq invasion last year that The Times had been guilty of flawed journalism.
"Some of The Times's coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines," said Okrent.
The newspaper's editors on Wednesday acknowledged they had failed to challenge adequately information from Iraqi exiles who were determined to show Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and overthrow him.
The editors said they "should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism." Among other things, they said the paper had relied on "misinformation" from Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, once considered Washington's top Iraq ally.
No chemical, biological or nuclear weapons were found in Iraq after the invasion.
Okrent wrote that a series of articles on the search for weapons of mass destruction by a Times reporter who was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq "constituted an ongoing minuet of startling assertion followed by understated contradiction."
But he said it would be unfair to pin the blame on specific reporters. "The failure was not individual, but institutional," he said.
Okrent blamed "the hunger for scoops," saying Times readers "encountered some rather breathless stories built on unsubstantiated 'revelations' that, in many instances, were the anonymity-cloaked assertions of people with vested interests."
He said some stories pushed the Pentagon line so aggressively "you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors."
Okrent, who was appointed in December as part of efforts to restore the paper's image following the Jayson Blair scandal, said editors needed to launch a series of "aggressively reported stories detailing the misinformation, disinformation and suspect analysis that led virtually the entire world to believe (Saddam) had WMD at his disposal."
"The aggressive journalism that I long for, and that the paper owes both its readers and its own self-respect, would reveal not just the tactics of those who promoted the WMD stories, but how The Times itself was used to further their cunning campaign."
The editor of the Times at the time of the Iraq invasion was Howell Raines, who resigned amid recriminations over the discovery that Blair had invented some stories and plagiarized others over a lengthy period.
Good grief! Every week it's a different tack with these liberals.
"We was all hyp-no-tized by da evil Medusa
from da Bush Aminastrashun!
bttt
After all, he used WMD on them and killed tens of thousands of people.
What I'd like to know is why the new management at the NYT wants to be part of what is quite clearly the AlQaida Ground Support Team in America?
These people are misusing freedom of the press and wasting valuable assets that deserve new owners and managers.
They're just trying to sanitize their image for the fearful faithful who populate the Left. It's all part of a plan of preparation for the home stretch of the upcoming election. Their hatred for Dubya and everything honorable knows no bounds.
So they're denying that Saddam ever killed over 40,000 Kurds with nerve gas? Gee, I just can't imagine why the NYT is hemorrhaging money and credibility.
Cut costs. Fire Okrent.
Of course no mention of the 28+ straight days of front-page coverage of the 5 month old Abu Ghraib business, which was being handled properly by the military and was already a non-story by the time the pictures were obtained a month ago.
Huh? Since when, since this morning?
It's like what Ann Coulter said, "The beauty of being a liberal is that history always begins this morning."
-PJ
LOL! Hadn't heard that one.
Okay. So they have established as fact that they have no jounalistic integrity. That stands alone. The issue is beside the point. If that is their journalistic character, then everything they print is suspect.
-PJ
This guy is an insult to the readers of the Slimes. For crying out loud, the Slimes circulation dropped during
the Gulf War, like 50,000 copies, daily, because of their failure to report the facts (i.e., the US was kicking butt) of the then current battles.
So, I like to know just how the Pentagon was using the Slimes?
This idiot's showing up in December of 2003 is no excuse for what appears to be either shoddy research, or he has his
own agenda and facts and history be damned.
No, it's that the newspaper is not far enough to the left.
They need to stop printing in black ink and switch over to red. Just be done with it.
Here's the problem...to read that editorial you have to read the NY Times. Oh well, guess I'll never see it.
Bush cited five reasons for attacking Iraq; finding caches of mass weapons was not one of them. Bush never said that he believed that stockpiles of WMD existed.
The NY Times got their info from sources outside the government. The other old media repeated it and soon everyone, including me, believed that our objective was finding and destroying WMD, instead of replacing a genocidal tyrant who was developing a nuclear and WMD program.
The NY Times and other liberals have been digging for direct quotes from Bush that they can use to say he lied to America. The closest they could come was that reference to British info on "African uranium", which the NY Times changed to "Niger yellow cake". I think the NY Times is just now realizing that it was they, not Bush who was lying about WMD.
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