THE TIMES'S WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION

New York Times public editor Bill Okrent writes a piece critical of his newspaper's role in the lackey-like coverage of the Bush administration's assertions and the Iraq war. (It goes further than the Times's note from the editors.) In it, he examines how pack mentality increasingly pervades journalism ahead of context and correctness, even when newspapers should know better.

In some instances, reporters who raised substantive questions about certain stories were not heeded. Worse, some with substantial knowledge of the subject at hand seem not to have been given the chance to express reservations. It is axiomatic in newsrooms that any given reporter's story, tacked up on a dartboard, can be pierced by challenges from any number of colleagues. But a commitment to scrutiny is a cardinal virtue. When a particular story is consciously shielded from such challenges, it suggests that it contains something that plausibly should be challenged. ...

The aggressive journalism that I long for, and that the paper owes both its readers and its own self-respect, would reveal not just the tactics of those who promoted the W.M.D. stories, but how The Times itself was used to further their cunning campaign.

In 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz wrote that The Times had missed the real story of the Bolshevik Revolution because its writers and editors "were nervously excited by exciting events." That could have been said about The Times and the war in Iraq. The excitement's over; now the work begins.

A New York magazine article details some of the transgressions by Judith Miller, the Times's reporter on WMD who is at the source of the paper's accommodating coverage.

The article, on its second of five pages, states:

In February, on the public-radio show "The Connection," she said, "My job was not to collect information and analyze it independently as an intelligence agency; my job was to tell readers of the New York Times, as best as I could figure out, what people inside the governments, who had very high security clearances, who were not supposed to talk to me, were saying to one another about what they thought Iraq had and did not have in the area of weapons of mass destruction."

Her Iraq coverage didn’t just depend on Chalabi. It also relied heavily on his patrons in the Pentagon. Some of these sources, like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, would occasionally talk to her on the record. She relied especially heavily on the Office of Special Plans, an intelligence unit established beneath Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. The office was charged with uncovering evidence of Al Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein that the CIA might have missed.

Like so many administration officials, editors at The New York times turned a blind eye to signs of impending trouble.