One Reporter Apologizes, Knight-Ridder Doesn't Need To

Reporter Apologizes for Iraq Coverage

While the major media, from The New York Times on down, has largely remained silent about their own failings in this area, a young columnist for a small paper in Fredericksburg, Va., has stepped forward.

"The media are finished with their big blowouts on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and there is one thing they forgot to say: We're sorry," Rick Mercier wrote, in a column published Sunday in The Free Lance-Star.

"Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage. Sorry we were dismissive of experts who disputed White House charges against Iraq. Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell for Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations. Sorry we couldn't bring ourselves to hold the administration's feet to the fire before the war, when it really mattered.

"Maybe we'll do a better job next war."

Mercier admitted that it was "absurd to receive this apology from a person so low in the media hierarchy. You really ought to be getting it from the editors and reporters at the agenda-setting publications, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post."

A team from Knight Ridder, led by two veteran editors, has supplied some of the best homegrown scoops on Iraq.

Hoyt had observed that "by and large, coverage of the war mainly amplified the official line." His bureau's coverage, he explains, "did not start from an antiwar position but from questioning the case made for a pre-emptive war. As we began exploring we found a lot more division and doubt within the government than top officials, and much of the press, were expressing.Now we feel we owe it to every single member of the military killed or wounded, their families, and the public at large, to keep exploring how and why this war happened, until the full story is out there." Knight Ridder, he says, felt a special responsibility, since it (unlike, say, The New York Times Co. and Tribune Co.) fields so many papers in military towns. As KR's own Joe Galloway once put it, "war ought to be the hardest thing a country can do."

Walcott explains that the bureau's skepticism about the case for war was sparked after checking "every single claim" made by the administration about Saddam's links to al-Qaeda and finding they simply "didn't make sense." From that, "one question led to another," he recalls.

But there's another reason KR was so "alert" (as Ben Bradlee would phrase it) when some of the other national news outlets were not. "Our sources," Walcott says, "include a large number of people at the working level in government, not on the cocktail circuit. These unglamorous people — they could be called the 'blue- collar' type — actually handled intelligence and saw it different than officials."