Observations on media

Speaking at Harvard's Institute of Politics in 1989, the journalist Carl Bernstein, famed for covering the Watergate scandal, said: "The press has been engaged in a kind of orgy of self- congratulations about our performance in Watergate and about our performance in covering the news since. And it seems to me no attitude could be more unjustified."

Long after the arrests of five burglars at the Democratic National Committee's executive offices on 17 June 1972, the media accepted the White House depiction of a petty crime without political ramifications. In the first six months after the break-in, Bernstein pointed out, of 2,000 reporters in Washington, just 14 were assigned to cover the story full-time.

As Watergate was being uncovered, US courts exposed an FBI programme that involved assassination, organisation of race riots, attacks on the women's and Native American movements and much else. It stretched back 15 years under four administrations. About this the media had little to say.

The UK media now laud a comparable triumph of crusading journalism. A Guardian leader claims: "Long before the [Iraq] war, this newspaper and others, here and in the US, reported a rising tide of anxiety within intelligence circles about perceived political pressure to provide hard evidence of an Iraqi WMD threat." The ITN political editor, Nick Robinson, insists to a MediaLens reader: "No one can accuse me or ITV News of not rigorously challenging the case for war and the reason WMD is missing [sic]." Johann Hari, the Independent columnist, describes how the BBC's "attack-dog culture", ripping into the government at every possible turn on Iraq, is a form of "anti-politics". The fallout from the Hutton report, John Kampfner notes in the New Statesman, is "a tragedy for investigative journalism" as, pre-Hutton, the BBC was "beginning to ask searching questions".

Nothing could be further from the truth. The British and Iraqi people were utterly betrayed by British journalism in the 18 months leading up to the war. It failed to ask even the most obvious questions about the documented evidence that indicated UN weapons inspectors' near-total success in disarming Iraq between 1991 and 1998; about the known shelf-lives of any retained Iraqi WMDs; about the record of Iraqi co-operation with inspectors; and about the real, cynical reasons why CIA-infiltrated inspections were cancelled in 1998.

The former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter - all but blanked by the US-UK "liberal media" ahead of the war - argued in 2002 that Iraq had been "fundamentally disarmed" of 90-95 per cent of its WMDs by December 1998. Ritter comments: "I don't believe the mainstream media acted responsibly in regard to Iraq. Back in the fall of 2002, I was belittled. I was called a traitor. I was called crazy . . . I think we have a problem here in that the media are culpable for the misleading of the American public."

There are parallels to Watergate, but not the ones the media have in mind. The White House press corps veteran Helen Thomas said it all: "We realise that we did a lousy job on Watergate. We just sat there and took what they said at face value."

The same was true of the press reaction to government claims of a Serbian "genocide" in Kosovo that prompted a Nato assault in 1999. One might think recent events would have led to a fresh look at the gross lies surrounding that earlier "humanitarian intervention". But with the establishment united in silence, the press has nothing to say.

David Edwards and David Cromwell are co-editors of MediaLens (www.medialens.org)

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