Law, Power, and Justice

How one team of reporters got it right.
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/iraq/journalism-press-failed-iraq-walcott

The failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq show what happens when top officials ignore their subordinates or assemble their own teams of analysts to confirm their biases—and when journalists become stenographers for them. Unfortunately, 20 years on, there is little evidence that the Washington press corps has learned this lesson. If anything, today’s bleak media environment has only made it harder to get the story right.

Both the administration and some major news outlets continued to rely on information from Chalabi, who cunningly pivoted from positing an Iraq–al Qaeda connection to providing dubious intelligence about Saddam’s alleged WMD programs. Chalabi often fed the same information to the Pentagon and to the press, which made some journalists think they had two sources when they had only one

For most of 2002 and early 2003, the Bush administration’s main public relations task was to sell the war, and too many news organizations were buying it.