Last night, Campaign Desk attended a forum entitled “War, Elections, and the News Media: Who Controls the Story?” sponsored by our parent, the Columbia Journalism Review.
In the course of the evening, panelists Paul Krugman, Princeton economist and opinion columnist at the New York Times, and Michael Massing, CJR contributing editor and author of the seminal critique of the press for its abysmal performance during the run-up to war in Iraq, both observed that the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder Newspapers stood alone for its pre-war reporting that questioned the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
This was not opinion journalism; it was painstaking shoe-leather reporting that a) cast into doubt the rationale for the war, b) was ignored at the time by the Bigfoots in the Washington press corps, c) has since been justified by events, and d) has now become a campaign issue. So why, we wondered, did it fail to make any ripples at the time? Krugman and Massing agreed on the answer: Knight Ridder has no outlets in either Washington or New York, so its accounts were ignored by the elite print and broadcast press.
It’s true — Knight Ridder Newspapers doesn’t have an outlet in Washington D.C. or New York City. But let’s get real: this is not a chain of half a dozen newspapers in, say, South Dakota. Knight Ridder owns over 30 papers across the U.S., including the dominant voices in Philadelphia, Miami, Detroit, San Jose and Charlotte, North Carolina. Combined, the number of readers that the KR Washington bureau reaches far exceeds the combined circulation of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The Knight Ridder bureau’s implicit warning of the fiasco to come reached millions of readers — but it was ignored not just by policy makers but also by those members of the press who rank higher on the food chain. That’s as clear a case as we have seen of the blinders that afflict not only those in power but also the media elite who pretend to report on them.
–Steve Lovelady
