Press Still Falling Down on Iraq

The ACLU's success at breaking news also raises the question of how aggressive our press has been in challenging military rationales and White House message points.

New York - Since when did the American Civil Liberties Union become a media organization? Or put another way: why have so much of our press fallen down on the job of pushing the Bush Administration to disclose information about its war-related practices, ranging from how it provides for our troops to detailing military abuse of prisoners and detainees?

Documents pried from the government by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act , and disclosed this week, suggest that the abuse of detainees was more systematic than we knew and ordered from on high. One email even indicates that President Bush signed off on the policy. While the administration disputes the document, that famous question raised during the Watergate investigation comes around again in a different form: What did the President know and when did he forget he knew it?

The ACLU's success at breaking news also raises the question of how aggressive our press has been in challenging military rationales and White House message points.

Even as the frame and focus of coverage changed from liberation to occupation, from invasion to insurgency, the essential news dynamic remains the same. It's still AAU: "All About U.S."

Compare the number of stories devoted to the impact the war has had on the people of Iraq with the number on body armor and troop deployments. The destruction of Fallujah has slipped not only off the front pages, but every page. Not only is there no continuing reporting on civilian casualties (estimates range from 20,000 to 100,000 or more) but also few on why so many average Iraqis oppose the occupation.

Ironically the best mainstream account of on the ground realities remains the one by Farnaz Fassihi, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose gripping account was sent out in a private email, not a published story.

One of our best war reporters, Chris Hedges of The New York Times, seems to find it easier to get his perspective out in books and magazines than in his own newspaper. In his most recent piece he observes: "War is presented primarily through the distorted prism of the occupiers. The embedded reporters, dependent on the military for food and transportation as well as security, have a natural and understandable tendency, one I have myself felt, to protect those who are protecting them. And the reporting, even among those who struggle to keep some distance, usually descends into a shameful cheerleading."

Stories of abuse of detainees only became well known after photographs appeared on TV and in The New Yorker. But even then, when CBS did its story on Abu Ghraib in April 2004, the major media was late to the story.

We now have personal "trophy" photos of horrific abuse from service families dating back to May 2003. Amnesty International began campaigning on the story with videos in July 2003. And yet it only became a big deal in the late spring of 2004.

Then the major media filed it away again, until that famous news organization, the ACLU, gave them more fodder this week.

And even then, to this day, the focus has been on individuals who committed abuses, rather than those up the chain of command who ordered it, or knew about it and said nothing. To this day sanitized terms like "abuse" are frequently used to substitute for the more legally correct words like "torture" and "war crimes."

I recently made a documentary called "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception," and one complaint by a critic really got my blood boiling: The public knows all this already. Yet fully 50% of the Bush voters told pollsters before the election they still believed there are WMD's in Iraq, even after the president himself said he no longer believes it.

If public opinion on the war is shifting - with 56% now saying the invasion was a bad idea - it can't be because of the media.


Danny Schechter is an Emmy Award-winning former ABC News and CNN producer. Besides making films, he is the "blogger-in-chief" at Mediachannel.org. This commentary appeared first in Editor & Publisher.