Sometimes news outlets given to echoing each other can echo silence instead of noise. This is the story of one such silence — one now interrupted by the distant rumble of unhappy readers questioning the silence itself.
On May 2, the Sunday Times of London ran what was considered a bombshell in Britain, reprinting a document that has since become known as the “Downing Street Memo.” The memo consists of little more than the minutes of a meeting of British prime minister Tony Blair’s senior national security team on July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion of Iraq; but its size obscures the weight of what it contains. In it, “C,” a British diplomat just back from meetings with American officials in Washington, recounts his impressions about the Bush administration’s intentions to go to war with Iraq. There are several smoking guns in the memo, not the least of which is this passage, which activists are pointing to as proof positive that the American government molded evidence to fit its desire to invade Iraq, and that the British government went along dutifully:
There was a perceptible shift in attitude [in the Bush administration]. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.
The Blair government hasn’t disavowed any of the material contained in the memo, even as the British media kicked around Blair himself about it in the days leading up to the national elections earlier this month. The American media, however, have been noticeably slower in taking the story on. On May 2, the day the story appeared in London, the New York Times made mention of it, but only in passing in a piece about the upcoming British elections. Since then — save for a Paul Krugman op-ed column earlier this week — the Times has made only fleeting reference to the memo in a few other stories, usually ones dealing with the election in Britain.
In the days following the Times’ initial (brief) mention of the memo, the rest of the American press remained strangely silent on the story. Finally, on May 12, the Los Angeles Times wrote of it in a story on page A3, while the Washington Post jumped in the next day — on page A18.
It’s worth noting that the Post ran its story almost a full week after its ombudsman, Michael Getler, noted that readers had been writing in to complain about the lack of coverage.
Getler followed up on May 15, writing, “There were more than 1,000 emails, plus some phone calls, all of them blasting the Post and some of them blasting me.” He notes that at least some of the complaints were organized by liberal media watchdog groups Media Matters and FAIR. Regardless, he goes on to say that he was “amazed” that it took the Post two weeks to treat the issue in even a cursory fashion.
It seems Getler is not alone in hearing it from his readers and activist groups. Incoming Times public editor Barney Calame told CJR Daily that “We are getting emails from readers and we think a large number of those are part of organized efforts to question what we printed.”
Calame defends the Times‘ treatment of the issue, saying that “There are some papers that really didn’t have anything. The Times was there, and I’m just holding that up as a fact because a lot of the emails we get are written as if the Times never printed a word.” It’s true the Times didn’t ignore the story — but it came closer to printing “a word” about the memo and its effect in Britain than it did to doing the tale justice.
Across the country, Michael Arrieta-Walden, public editor of the Oregonian, agrees that the letters coming in complaining about the lack of his paper’s coverage of the memo appear to be “a little orchestrated” — but the issue has nonetheless generated the most mail this past week.
“Clearly,” Arrieta-Walden says, “[readers] have picked up on it and have heard about it, but we’ve also run a couple stories related to it as well [one being a Knight-Ridder story on May 6]. The common complaint has been that we did not play the May 6 story on the front page. We played it on page A3 … but a lot of the readers are saying it should have been on the front page.”
Truth be told, there isn’t anything entirely new in the memo. Reports have come out here and there — including in Bob Woodward’s book, Bush at War, released last year — that show that plans for the invasion got underway in November 2001, when the president ordered Donald Rumsfeld to begin drawing up invasion scenarios.
The Oregonian‘s Arrieta-Walden makes this very point. Protestations of some critics notwithstanding, he says that “some aspects of the story make it not as newsworthy as some of the advocates think. … [It] refers to one person’s recollection of this meeting — although it confirms in some way some of the information that has come out over time through the investigations of intelligence failures in the sense of some of the errors and bad assumptions made. I guess what I’m saying, really, is that it isn’t the slam dunk, necessarily, that they see it as.”
But this hasn’t stopped the flood of angry reader mail. The issue has become so heated that on Thursday, Gina Lubrano, the executive secretary of the Organization of News Ombudsmen, sent out an email asking ombudsmen what the public’s reaction to the lack of coverage of the issue has been. (The unfortunately-acronymed ONO is still collecting responses.)
Weighing the import of this story — it does show that the British government was convinced by mid-2002 that the Bush administration was going to invade Iraq, no matter what the pre-war search for WMD found — is a tough call. On the one hand, the story the memo tells is already public knowledge. On the other hand, over 1,600 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives fighting a war waged under what appear to be false premises.
Every editor must make his or her own decisions, but one would hope that those editors would also listen to a readership that demands to hear more about a subject that it suspects is being given short shrift, or even suppressed. And while it’s true that editors grow more skeptical, not less, when they think public reaction is being orchestrated by interest groups, it’s also true that such groups are sometimes on to something.
Finally, there’s a third truth to weigh — if a nervous and uncertain runaway-bride-who-comes-home can generate wall-to-wall coverage, laden with excruciating detail of that hapless soul’s forlorn 3,000-mile round trip, then surely a found document that cuts to the heart of just how two mighty nations find themselves mired in a two-year-old bloody guerilla war on the dusty plains and in the crowded cities of Iraq deserves more play than it has gotten to date.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.