Drowning Out the Real Issues

The historic role of the free press in free democratic societies is that of government watchdog. There have always been journalistic mistakes, controversies and scandals, and there always will be, as long as media are run by human beings. Today, however, what's clearly objectionable is how those mistakes are being used to deflect attention from more important government and political scandals and controversies.

Some conservative bloggers have suggested that the media should never criticize or raise critical questions of the military in wartime. Some have extended that criticism, conveniently, to cover the president's wartime policies. But that's such a different standard than what most journalists are taught. No wonder people think most reporters are liberal. It's because journalism is in itself, as a profession, by definition liberal.

"I think you can second guess whether Newsweek should have had two sources or not," Thomas G. Weston, a 35-year career U.S. diplomat who left his post as ambassador to Cyprus last year and now teaches at Georgetown University, told me. "You will always have, if you have a free press . . . to deal with stories that can have very adverse reactions, both in our own public and other publics in the world. I think that's one of the costs we bear for having a free press."

Whatever the case, had the White House accepted the same kind of accountability it now seeks from Newsweek, Bush would have taken complete responsibility for the faulty WMD claims, rather than blaming the intelligence community. He would have accepted Rumsfeld's resignation last year. And he never would have given Tenet the Medal of Freedom.

Since this is the accountability era, and it is widely agreed upon that Newsweek should account for its errors and apologize for its mistakes, perhaps we can get back to applying similarly stringent requirements on the elected officials who make grave decisions, such as whether to go to war.

When the media finish scrutinizing Newsweek, it should get back to asking tough questions of the Bush administration. Questions like:

Who should be held responsible for the faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that led the United States to declare war against Iraq?

Why has the president not apologized for warning America that Iraq presented an imminent threat, when that turned out to be the case?

Will Rumsfeld, who claimed prior to the war to know the precise locations of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, personally apologize to the families of the troops who died in the search for those weapons?

Given that McClellan has suggested that Newsweek editors need to go on Arab TV and explain and apologize for their errors, will Bush also go on Arab television to explain and apologize for the mistakes made in gathering and analyzing the pre-war intelligence?

Will the administration, which downplayed the costs of the war in Iraq, publicly apologize to taxpayers now that the costs have already exceeded $300 billion?

Some will argue that such questions are irrelevant or miss the point because Bush's bold action in Iraq got rid of a tyrant who was abusing his own people and because it will eventually lead to the spread of democracy in the area. Both may be true. But the case for war was built neither on humanitarianism nor on spreading democracy. Those arguments were, at most, used to bolster the main case, which was that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction and presented an imminent threat to America and its allies.

Some will also argue that the media only push aggressively to investigate Republican administrations. That's a difficult case to make. A simple Lexis search shows, for instance, that the Washington Post ran 415 stories about Monicagate on its front page in the 1998 calendar year.

Some on the left will argue that the Clinton scandal was trumped up, overblown, media madness. I disagree. It was an important story and deserved the front-page treatment it was given. But it also seems true that questions about a war that was fought on an acknowledged false premise are at least as important as questions about one president's efforts to lie about a consensual affair with another adult.