Remembering the Iraq war: How Knight Ridder dug up the truth about Dick Cheney’s falsehoods
It was sadly ironic that the death of McClatchy’s Washington bureau was announced on the same day as that of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Because it was McClatchy — then known as Knight Ridder — that did more than any news organization to expose the Bush-Cheney administration’s lies and falsehoods in the run-up to the disastrous war in Iraq. Cheney, through frequent speeches and media interviews, became the public face of the war and its subsequent horrors, including the torture of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American forces.
Following the attack by Al Qaeda in the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush-Cheney administration invaded Afghanistan, which the terrorist group had made as its base. But the White House wanted to expand the war to Iraq, claiming that dictator Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction and had ties to Al Qaeda. Neither of those allegations proved to be true, but the U.S. nevertheless marched into Iraq in the spring of 2003, a debacle that ended, more or less, in 2011. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, mostly Iraqi civilians.
The road to war was paved with credulous reporting by our leading news organizations, especially The New York Times and The Washington Post. But there was one shining exception — the Knight Ridder Washington bureau, which served leading newspapers such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press. The story was told most fully in a lengthy essay written by Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books. Published in February 2004 and headlined “Now They Tell Us” (sub. req.), the article goes into fine detail on the media failures that allowed Bush and Cheney free rein in building their case for war. As for Knight Ridder, Massing wrote:
Almost alone among national news organizations, Knight Ridder had decided to take a hard look at the administration’s justifications for war. As Washington bureau chief John Walcott recalled, in the late summer of 2002 “we began hearing from sources in the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service of doubts about the arguments the administration was making.” Much of the dissent came from career officers disturbed over the allegations being made by political appointees. “These people,” he said, “were better informed about the details of the intelligence than the people higher up in the food chain, and they were deeply troubled by what they regarded as the administration’s deliberate misrepresentation of intelligence, ranging from overstating the case to outright fabrication.”
An especially crucial Knight Ridder article reported in October 2002 that “a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration’s double-time march toward war.” These officials, the reporters wrote:
charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses — including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network. … They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House’s argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.
Unfortunately, this tough reporting was largely overlooked. Then as now, the Times, the Post and The Wall Street Journal set the agenda for the national conversation, and the network nightly newscasts took many of their cues from those papers. As Massing observed, Knight Ridder did not have a paper in either New York or Washington, and editors of the national papers relied on their own coverage rather than what a less influential competitor was reporting. Massing found that the Knight Ridder stories had some influence on other news outlets, but it wasn’t enough to overcome what had become a cavalcade of pro-war voices. Massing again:
With a popular president promoting war, Democrats in Congress were reluctant to criticize him. This deprived reporters of opposition voices to quote, and of hearings to cover. Many readers, meanwhile, were intolerant of articles critical of the President. Whenever The Washington Post ran such pieces, reporter Dana Priest recalls, “We got tons of hate mail and threats, calling our patriotism into question.” Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and The Weekly Standard, among others, all stood ready to pounce on journalists who strayed, branding them liberals or traitors — labels that could permanently damage a career. Gradually, journalists began to muzzle themselves.
I could go on. Although Massing’s essay is behind a paywall, I found it online at our university library, and you may be able to root it out at a public library, too. It is one of the finest pieces of media criticism I’ve ever read, and even at this late date it is well worth your time.
Knight Ridder eventually sold itself to the McClatchy chain, which took on an enormous amount of debt and paid down some of it by unloading a few of its newly acquired papers. The Philadelphia Inquirer is now independent and owned by a nonprofit foundation, while the Detroit Free Press is part of the USA Today Co. That’s the new brand for Gannett, which was announced Tuesday. Gannett, as readers of this blog know, is essentially the old GateHouse Media chain, which means that this is the second time GateHouse has entered the witness protection program. Sorry, GateHouse: We know who you are.
As for McClatchy, the chain has fallen on hard times. Oliver Darcy of Status News observes that group (sub. req.) has been owned by the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management since 2000, after McClatchy had fallen into bankruptcy. McClatchy owns 30 papers, mostly midsize dailies such as the Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee and The Kansas City Star.
As Darcy reports, McClatchy executives are touting the closure of the Washington bureau as a sign of their commitment to local coverage. “Change is never easy, but it’s how we secure the future of local journalism,” McClatchy vice president Greg Farmer said in a memo that Darcy obtained. “It’s a fight we must win.”
Unlike a community weekly, a daily paper’s mission is to provide a full range of coverage — international, national and regional as well as local. And it’s certainly the case that McClatchy papers can obtain such news at a lower cost from wire services such as The Associated Press, Reuters and, for that matter, the Times and the Post.
But having its own Washington bureau meant that McClatchy papers could publish national political news tailored to readers of its local papers. Farm policy would obviously be of more interest to readers in Kansas City than in New York, for example. Then, too, McClatchy could focus on the congressional delegations serving readers of its 30 newspapers.
That’s why the few remaining large independent dailies — including The Philly Inquirer, The Minnesota Star Tribune and The Boston Globe — still have Washington bureaus. The Globe even has an opinion columnist, Kimberly Atkins Stohr, stationed in Washington.
At this fraught moment in our history, the increasing lack of Washington-based reporters covering a specific region makes it more difficult for the public to connect the actions of the Trump regime with what’s going on in their communities.
And as the experience of the Knight Ridder bureau and the Bush-Cheney administration shows, it also means there are now fewer journalistic voices to hold the large national news organizations to account. You could look back at the war in Iraq and say it didn’t matter. But telling the truth always matters.