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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0701-04.htm

Published on Tuesday, July 1, 2003 by the Miami Herald
Was Times Coverage Tainted?
by Max Castro

What was the role of the American media in
''manufacturing consent'' among the American
people for the war in Iraq and its aftermath?

Jingoistic journalism has helped
bring about more than one war.

The most notorious example is the
Spanish-American war of 1898, in
which the yellow journalism of the time
played a key role by whipping up
anti-Spanish sentiment among the
populace.

Is there a parallel in Iraq?

Did the media cross the line beyond
reporting into assisting or cheerleading
the war effort?

Did even the
''nation's newspaper of record,''
The New York Times,

help Washington's hawks make a case for
the war by lending excessive credibility to
the official story regarding weapons of
mass destruction?

And,

if that bastion of alleged liberal media bias
suc***bed to the enormous power of government
manipulation, what can be said for lesser media?

The question arose anew last week with the
case of New York Times reporter Judith Miller,
who specializes in the Middle East,
terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

As reported in The Washington Post
by Howard Kurtz and by other media,
Miller's relations not only with the military
unit to which she was assigned but also
with civilian hawks in the Pentagon and
in hard-line Washington think tanks gives
a new definition to the term ``embedded.''

In the run-up to the war,
Miller helpfully passed along information
leaked anonymously by U.S. government
officials and Iraqi exiles implying the existence
of weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi
government's intention to use them.

On Nov. 12, in a Times front-page story,

"senior Bush administration officials report
Iraq has ordered large quantities of a drug
used to counter effects of nerve gas . . .

and suggest Iraq may be taking steps to
protect its own soldiers in the event it uses
nerve agents.''

The nerve gas never materialized.

Suffering enormous carnage,
defeated on every front, the Iraqi army somehow
never got around to using weapons of mass destruction.

Or, more likely, they didn't have them,
and that's why they haven't been found
two months after victory was declared.

No matter:

The information battle to justify the war was
won with a helping hand from the ''liberal'' media.

After the war, The Washington Post published
an internal May 1 Times e-mail in which Miller
stated that exiled Iraqi leader Ahmad Chalabi
''provided most of the front-page exclusives
on WMD to our paper.''

That's amazing, given that Chalabi,
a darling of Washington hard-liners,

had a vested interest in selling the idea
of a dire Iraqi threat as a way of riding
into power on the backs of American soldiers.

Chalabi's credibility is suspect as well because of
his exaggerated claims about his own popularity in Iraq.

Judging by the reliability of her sources,
it's not surprising that Miller's sensational
post-war stories

(U.S. ****ysts link Iraq labs to germ arms;

U.S. experts find radioactive material in Iraq;

U.S.-led forces occupy Baghdad
complex filled with chemical agents)

later turned out to be groundless.

(Is it any wonder one-third of Americans believe
weapons of mass destruction have been found?)

No weapons, no problem,
a convenient explanation for
their nonexistence can be found,
and Miller once again is the ideal conduit.

On April 21, Miller reported in The Times that
an Iraqi scientist had asserted Iraq only destroyed
its weapons of mass destruction on the eve of war.

But Miller's story was based on what officials
told her the Iraqi scientist said; she was not
allowed to interview him.

Meanwhile, Newsweek was reporting that,
despite tough interrogation, numerous Iraqi
scientists were all saying the weapons had
been destroyed many years earlier.

In the case of Jayson Blair,
the reporter who faked dozens of stories,
Times editors waited far too long.

Now they are defending Judith Miller,
whose reporting on Iraq seems to be
''all the news that fits the official story.''

Have they learned nothing?