An article in Life Magazine six months after the end of World War II decried:

"We have swept away Hitlerism, but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease."

"We've lost the peace".

"Never has American prestige in Europe been lower."

"Wherever the people have endured either the American armies or the Russian armies both hopes have been bitterly disappointed."

"The taste of victory had gone sour in the mouth of every thoughtful American I met."

Sounds so eerily familiar.....


The failure brigade
Mona Charen Oct. 17, 2003 http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |

There is a marked tendency among those on the left to believe the worst about the United States. This is particularly true when it comes to military action.


Before the war in Afghanistan, the failure chorus warned that Afghan fighters had withstood the mighty British and Soviet empires, that the winter weather would paralyze our troops and that the Taliban could count of the aid of Islamists worldwide. Before the Iraq War, the negativity brigade warned darkly that our troops would be subject to poison gas or chemical attack (yes, the same people who are now loudly proclaiming that Iraq never possessed those weapons); that the Israelis would be drawn into the conflict thus igniting a larger regional war; that Muslims worldwide would unite against us; that the price of oil would skyrocket; that Iraq's oil fields would burn out of control creating an environmental catastrophe; and that patriotic feeling would cause the Iraqis to fight to the death against us just as the Russians had fought the Nazis at Stalingrad.


Once the war had begun, many in the press declared that we had become bogged down in a quagmire after only a few days of fighting. When the Iraqi armed forces capitulated in the south, we were told that this was a clever way to draw us into a sustained "house by house" battle in Baghdad that would take months or years to win, if we won at all.


When Baghdad fell just three weeks after the war had begun, we were told that not since Nebuchadnezzar's time had Baghdad experienced such a terrible spate of looting and crime. The United States and Britain had just demonstrated that an enlightened coalition could liberate a nation enslaved by a tyrant in three weeks with very few civilian casualties, very little damage to the nation's infrastructure and extremely low casualties for the coalition itself. But the news media in Britain and the United States were singing lamentations.


Where oh where were the precious antiquities from the Iraqi Museum? (They were all fine, it turns out.) Why is the electricity still not functioning properly? Why are there shortages of water? What about the street crime?


Once each problem is solved, a new lament is discovered. I must say I predicted this back in February. It was just after Baghdad fell, and there was rejoicing in the streets. I was giving a talk at the local Barnes and Noble bookstore (it was on C-SPAN) and was asked, "What will the liberals say now?" I responded, "Well, in about a month they'll be complaining that Iraq is not yet a functioning democracy."


Does this drumbeat of negativity have any effects? I think it does. The first baleful effect is that the press is failing in its duty to provide the news straight. Yes, there are ambushes on our soldiers and bombings of embassies, and these must be covered. And there is a certain amount of lawlessness, and that, too, should be reported. But there are a great many aspects of the rebuilding of Iraq that the press is failing to convey.


More than 45 countries have offered military assistance in rebuilding Iraq, and that number now rises with this week's Security Council resolution pledging more aid. Thirty thousand Iraqis have traveled to Hungary for military and police training. The United States is training thousands of Iraqi police, with 34,000 already on the job. It isn't quick or easy to find suitable police in a country where, for 30 years, eligibility was determined by family or political connections -- to say nothing of a willingness to commit any human rights abuse in the name of the regime.


U.S. and international efforts are also rebuilding sports stadiums, schools, hospitals and power grids. They are doing so in the face of sabotage and murder. A little appreciation from home could go a long way.


Moreover, the Saddamists and Islamists who have gathered in Iraq to defeat us are not acting irrationally. They have historical reasons to believe that if they can inflict enough casualties on the United States, we will run. They cite Somalia, Lebanon and Vietnam.


What we are doing in Iraq is right morally and strategically. And it is succeeding on the ground. But the press has the power to distort reality. By presenting an overly bleak picture of the challenges we face, they can demoralize us.


MORE ON IRAQ AND THE MEDIA
by Glenn Reynold Oct 17


Writing in the National Journal, Jonathan Rauch joins those noticing the discrepancy between media accounts of what's going on in Iraq and what people who have been there say:

Consistently, however, observers -- including some I know personally and trust -- return from Iraq reporting that the picture up close is better than the images in the media. Michael O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institution military analyst who is no pushover for the Bush administration, recently came back saying that the quality of the work being done in Iraq by American forces is "stunning."

Another federal judge has weighed in on Iraq, too. Judge Gilbert Merritt, a Carter appointee on the U.S. Court of Appeals whom I clerked for after law school, visited Iraq on the same judicial-assistance mission as Judge Donald Walter, whose report I mentioned earlier, and offers a similar take:

Still, Merritt is optimistic. From his time in Iraq, he has come to believe that the overwhelming majority of people there support the reconstruction. . . .
An early opponent of the U.S. invasion, Merritt now says he saw a different dimension of Iraq while there and believes the United States was right to lead the coalition's campaign to oust Saddam.

Reports on Iraq contradicted by military analysts, federal judges, touring musicians, Democratic congressmen, and returning troops. Now that we know they're not telling us the whole story at home, or abroad, don't you think it's time for folks in the news business to rethink their priorities and performance? If any other industry were performing this poorly, the press would be running one expose after another.

Still, there's progress. An episode of Sixty Minutes II last week on Iraq got high marks for evenhandedness, though I didn't see it. So I guess they're educable, with time and effort. So don't be shy about emailing `em if you think they get it wrong!


Sept. 30, 2003 / 4:16 PM ET

IRAQ AND THE MEDIA, CONTINUED

Since my original post on the one-sided and negative media reporting on Iraq, other people have gotten into the act.

Columnist John Leo has noticed that the media are starting to respond, and writes:

Letters home from Iraq are now regularly put up on the Internet. One last week from Senior Chief Petty Officer Art Messer of the Navy Seabees said: "The countryside is getting more safe by the day despite all the attacks you are hearing about. Imagine if every shooting incident or robbery committed in Los Angeles was blown out of proportion." A few military personnel have their own blogs. One, who calls himself Chief Wiggles, is quite good.
The Internet campaign is another example of the new media going around the old media, in this case to counter stories by quagmire-oriented reporters.

That's absolutely right, and some bloggers are taking it a step farther with Front Line Voices, a new Weblog set up to let the troops report on what's going on.

But that bypass may become a bit less necessary, as Big Media types are showing signs of improvement. As Deborah Orin notes, Tom Brokaw did some actual reporting: and brought back an actual story:

One result is the surging growth of an Internet universe . . . focused on spreading good news from Iraq and lambasting "Big Media," especially the anti-American BBC, for ignoring it.
But this week's Time magazine is typical of a press corps that has - mostly - raced to highlight every bit of bad news from Iraq, and virtually none of the good news.
When NBC anchor Tom Brokaw went to Iraq, it was as if he was visiting a different country than any other TV journalist had reported from, because he left Baghdad and many of his reports actually had an optimistic tone.
Why? Perhaps because Brokaw has chronicled the Greatest Generation and World War II, a time of patience instead of attention deficit disorder and a demand for overnight success. Nowadays, one can imagine critics instantly howling for Dwight D. Eisenhower's head over the deaths on D-Day.

Imagine what we might hear if more reporters were willing to venture out in search of a story. And even within Baghdad, there are important stories that are being ignored in favor of the latest pinprick attacks by leftover Baathists. Saddam's holdings are being privatized. How that's done is vitally important -- but you can barely find a story about it in the Big Media. There are plans to turn Iraq's oil revenues into a "trust fund" for the benefit of Iraqis in general. How that's done is vitally important, too, but we're not hearing about it, either.

There are a lot of stories we're missing (Jay Rosen, chair of NYU's Journalism School, has some suggestions). Worse yet, we can't make good decisions without information, and the "police-blotter" reporting from Iraq means that Americans aren't getting that.



Sept. 23, 2003 / 5:28 PM ET

IRAQ MEDIA BACKLASH?

When I posted here on the relentless negativity of the media coverage of Iraq last week, I was ahead of the curve. But just barely. Now even Dan Rather is apologizing. John Leo has a column on the subject, and USA Todayhas a story quoting MSNBC's Dr. Bob Arnot as saying that he doesn't recognize the Iraq he's seen from the media reports:

"I contrast some of the infectious enthusiasm I see here with what I see on TV, and I say, `Oh, my God, am I in the same country?' "

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, a bunch of Democratic Congressmen just returned from Iraq and complained about the inaccurate negativity of the coverage:

Comparisons with Vietnam were farfetched, members said.
Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the committee's ranking member, said, "The media stresses the wounds, the injuries, and the deaths, as they should, but for instance in Northern Iraq, Gen. [Dave] Petraeus has 3,100 projects -- from soccer fields to schools to refineries -- all good stuff and that isn't being reported."
Skelton and other Democrats on the trip said they plan to reach out to all members of their caucus and explain what they observed.

I want to be clear here: There's nothing unpatriotic or evil about reporting bad news. But what the Big Media presence in Iraq is doing is manufacturing a storyline by engaging in what one of the congressmen on that trip called a "police-blotter" approach -- reporting every shooting in a country the size of California, while ignoring everything good that happens.

If you want to read a more balanced first-person report from Iraq, mixing good news and bad news and trying to provide some actual perspective, try this one. And then wonder why the Internet is beating the pants off the Old Media, yet again.


Sept. 22, 2003 / 11:58 AM ET

MORE ON IRAQ AND THE MEDIA


Following up on last week's post about Big Media coverage of Iraq, it seems that a few Big Media folks are catching on. Michael Barone's U.S. News column this week notes that critics of the goings-on in Iraq seem unfamiliar with history, and offers some examples of difficult transitions from war to peace after World Wars I and II that seem to have been forgotten. Barone also notes the one-sided character of the reporting:

The media also have the wrong standard for what is news. It is news when there is a fatal accident at Disneyland and not news when there is not. But Iraq is not Disneyland. In a country that is occupied after decades of a brutal dictatorship, good news is news. Yet with only a few exceptions -- see Michael Gordon's story in the New York Times on the 101st Airborne in northern Iraq -- the good news is not being told. More than 6,000 Iraqi civil affairs units -- local governments -- have been set up. Hospitals have been reopened. A court system has been set up. Mistakes, inevitable in a chaotic world, are being corrected: A Baathist leader put in charge in Najaf was soon removed.
Reports from soldiers on the ground, circulating widely on the Internet but seldom if ever appearing in old media, indicate that the large majority of Iraqis are friendly and helpful and glad that American troops are there.

Meanwhile, Canadian columnist David Warren writes:

And as for those media, everyone with a vote should read the courageous item by John Burns of the New York Times in the last issue of the trade magazine, Editor & Publisher. It is a breathtaking, first-hand account of the corruption among Western journalists in Baghdad before the fall of Saddam. Not minor, but total corruption; and not by a few but by almost all. Now the "embedded" reporters have come and gone, who gave us fresh and untutored eyewitness reporting that completely contradicted the sordid Baghdad media gaggle. So we are back to being fed "quagmire" stories by reporters with big axes to grind, and no credibility.

But the best example of Big Media recognition that there's more going on than the standard reporting has made clear can be found in a C-SPAN interview with UPI correspondent Pamela Hess, who has just returned from Iraq. (You can stream the video from C-SPAN's Webpage -- just select the one marked "Pamela Hess, Defense Correspondent, United Press International").

Hess is no cheerleader -- in fact, at about 34 minutes into the interview she provides a pointed and cogent critique of what the administration, and in particular the civilian occupation authorities, are doing wrong in Iraq that's more detailed and clearer than anything I've read in the hundreds of cut-and-paste faux-Vietnam reports -- but she also says this, at about 2:42 into the interview:

"Outside of Baghdad, things really aren't as bad as they look on the news. Now, naturally on the news, we're gonna focus on where the troubles are, because that's what makes news. But there are places in Iraq where things are going pretty well. You can't say `just fine' because the power is down, there's no phone service, but things are pretty peaceful. People are patient and are slowly rebuilding things back together."

She also observes later, at about 8:20, "Statistically, the numbers are kind of low in terms of Americans who are getting killed over there."

This is actual reporting, rather than cherry-picking stories to fit a preconceived notion. And that's my complaint about most of the Big Media reporting on Iraq. It may be, as Daniel Drezner has written, that there really isn't a single coherent story on Iraq. But the Big Media reporting has tried to construct just such a story, not because it's true, but because, for a variety of reasons explored in my previous post, it's the story that they want to tell. (They also spend a fair amount of time, as Bill Hobbs points out, accusing the administration of justifying the war on grounds it explicitly avoided, so as to make things look worse.) I hope that I'm managing to let a little air into their hermetically sealed world, and I hope that they'll be forced by the facts on the ground -- and viewers' growing tendency to tune out -- to do a better job.

We can hope, anyway.

UPDATE: After I wrote the above, but before it appeared online, a reader sent me a link to this piece by Democratic Congressman Jim Marshall, who recently visited Iraq. Marshall says that the relentlessly negative media coverage is encouraging pro-Saddam holdouts and is thus "killing our troops."

Harsh, but I'd say it's true. The good news is that, with Democratic congressmen starting to say it, maybe the media will listen. Marshall also notes:

I'm afraid the news media are hurting our chances. They are dwelling upon the mistakes, the ambushes, the soldiers killed, the wounded, the Blumbergs. Fair enough. But it is not balancing this bad news with "the rest of the story," the progress made daily, the good news.
The falsely bleak picture weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation and emboldens our enemy.

Read the whole thing -- and e-mail a copy to any members of the press you think should read it!


Sept. 19, 2003 / 11:52 AM ET

MEDIA LIES, AND THE LYING MEDIA LIARS WHO TELL THEM


Things just get worse for the British Broadcasting Corp., as the initial claim that Tony Blair's government "sexed up" an intelligence dossier about Iraq has exploded, and revealed a miserable tissue of lies and shoddiness at the BBC. The BBC correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, has been left out in the cold by the BBC, which initially defended him. Oxford blogger Joshua Chafetz is gloating that events have proved him right in his conjecture that the BBC had let its anti-war bias lure it into self-destruction.

Sadly, it's not just the BBC. New York Times Iraq correspondent John Burns reports that many journalists in Iraq were deliberately slanting their stories to curry favor with Saddam's regime

Interestingly, non-Big Media reports from Iraq are a lot more positive than the steady rain of negativity that we get from the media. Here's what federal judge Don Walter wrote after visiting Iraq as part of a judicial assistance team:

Despite my initial opposition to the war, I am now convinced, whether we find any weapons of mass destruction or prove Saddam sheltered and financed terrorists, absolutely, we should have overthrown the Baathists, indeed, we should have done it sooner.
What changed my mind?
When we left mid June, 57 mass graves had been found, one with the bodies of 1200 children. There have been credible reports of murder, brutality and torture of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqi citizens. There is poverty on a monumental scale and fear on a larger one. That fear is still palpable.
I have seen the machines and places of torture. I will tell you one story told to me by the Chief of Pediatrics at the Medical College in Basra. It was one of the most shocking to me, but I heard worse. One of Saddam's security agents was sent to question a Shiite in his home. The interrogation took place in the living room in the presence of the man's wife, who held their three month old child. A question was asked and the thug did not like the answer; he asked it again, same answer. He grabbed the baby from its mother and plucked its eye out. And then repeated his question. Worse things happened with the knowledge, indeed with the participation, of Saddam, his family and the Baathist regime.
Thousands suffered while we were messing about with France and Russia and Germany and the UN. Every one of them knew what was going on there, but France and the UN were making millions administering the food for oil program. We cannot, I know, remake the world, nor do I believe we should. We cannot stamp out evil, I know. But this time we were morally right and our economic and strategic interests were involved. I submit that just because we can't do everything doesn't mean that we should do nothing. . . .
We must have the moral courage to see this through, to do whatever it takes to secure responsible government for the Iraqi people. Having decided to topple Saddam, we cannot abandon those who trust us. I fear we will quit as the horrors of war come into our living rooms. Look at the stories you are getting from the media today. The steady drip, drip, drip of bad news may destroy our will to fulfill the obligations we have assumed. WE ARE NOT GETTING THE WHOLE TRUTH FROM THE NEWS MEDIA. The news you watch, listen to and read is highly selective. Good news doesn't sell.


Nor is Judge Walter the only one to tell a different tale than the Big Media are reporting. The Blogcritics site publishes a first-hand report from a musician touring in the Middle East, who says:

ALL the Iraqis are done with the idea of Arab Unity. They hate all the other states except for Syria. They believe Saddam gave so much money to these other states, and none of them offered any support. They are particularly hateful now to the Palestinians; ordinary Iraqis were sometimes moved out of their own homes to house them, and they got jobs and pensions-- and she said that the new Arabic graffiti on the walls of Baghdad University is "Palestinians go home. The free ride is over."
In any case, this tour was a lovefest compared to the last one, so god only knows what the reporters are all going on about. Another thing I heard is that 90% of all the attacks have happened in the Sunni Triangle, which if you look on a map represents all of about 1/8 of Iraq maybe (Ramadi, Fallujah, Baghdad-- I don't have a good map to do the math with), so you have a country 7/8 calm. This guy's Iraqi mom (from Mosul) also said that the power is now on regularly in Baghdad but no one is reporting that.
If CNN hasn't gotten it, it appears that Assad in Syria has. The cabinet change was a big thing even though many hoped/expected that Assad would choose a non-Baathist over Otri. Still, they think a few of the new guys will be non-Baathists which would have been unthinkable before.
They sure need it-- the country is a beautiful basket case full of intelligent, kind people who could do something good if given a chance. On a more superficial, but probably important level as well, the kids military uniforms we saw last year are all gone, and a lot of the militarization you used to see in posters and monuments, etc. seems to have been toned down. The Lebanese paper, The Star, attributes this directly albeit grudgingly to the US being right next door.

Similarly, here's a report from returning servicemen:

Both men said they are glad to be home visiting their families -- and feel honored and grateful for all the support they received from the community while they were in the Middle East. Both of them also said things are going well for the U.S. troops in Iraq.
"Ninety-nine percent of what is going on over there is a good story," said Callanan.
"There were a lot of reporters over there who overlooked the good stories, which may have been the only frustrating part of being there," he said. "From media reports, it may not seem as though things are going well there but they are. There are a lot of changes taking place which will eventually pay big dividends."
Cheung agreed that the media reports he read while in Iraq seemed so much different from what he was seeing for himself. One of the things he read that goaded him the most was that the Iraqis did not want the troops over there.
"I talked to so many Iraqis -- adults and children -- and they thanked me, invited me to their house, asked if they can cook a meal for me and offered me everything they have," he said. "Because we were there, they have the freedom we enjoy in this country every day. They waved to us and a lot of times they worked with us."

You'd never know this from listening to the whining of CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, who has been complaining that CNN's coverage isn't negative enough and blaming it on "intimidation." This produced the following list of the top 10 ways CNN was intimidated. It also led blogger Roger Simon to compare Amanpour -- unfavorably -- with John Burns, and led another blogger to write: "I once respected her as a reporter, but that has all drained away in the last year." And Professor Daniel Drezner has more comments on Amanpour's credibility. She is, however, merely emblematic of a larger problem.

This mismatch between what we're hearing from non-journalists in Iraq, and the unending lugubrious flow from Big Media, is shaping up to be the next blow to the credibility of Big Journalism. Why are the reports we're getting so lousy? You might argue that the situation is complex, and that these positive stories are only part of what's going on. But that doesn't explain why the coverage is so unrelentingly negative, and why stories like these get so little attention. I think it's a combination of factors:

Bias: Everybody knows -- because it's true -- that a lot of people in the media don't like Bush, and would like to see him lose in 2004. That naturally produces a negative tone. Plus, the press has been generally anti-military since Vietnam. That's fading now, as out-of-date baby boomers are replaced, but it hasn't faded entirely by any means. James Lileks compares the favorable press treatment of Clinton's abortive 1998 Iraq invasion ("Operation Desert Fox") and nails it with this:

I've read enough editorials from various papers from this period to reinforce something I've long suspected: the reason many editorialists hate this war is because they don't feel it's theirs.
If Clinton had risen to the occasion, wiped out al-Qaida, sent Marines to kick down the statues and put bullets in those filthy sons' brainpans, this would be the most noble effort of our time. We would hear clear echoes of JFK's call to bear any burden. FDR, Truman, Marshall Plan, forbearance, patience -- the editorial pages of the land would absolutely brim with encouragement and optimism every damn day, because the good fight was being waged, and the right people were waging it.
Read the whole Lileks piece if you have time. It's devastating.

Butt-covering: As CNN's Eason Jordan admitted after the war, CNN slanted its coverage to make Saddam look good for years. That's how they maintained "access." (What good is "access" when all it produces are lies? Well, no good -- except to the journalists whose careers it enhances. We've seen journalists develop something akin to the "ticket punching" mentality that the U.S. Army had in Vietnam, where being able to say you were there is more important than the quality of work you did.)

More butt-covering: Many media people predicted disaster before the war, based on their alleged expertise in the area. They were proved wrong again and again, and would like to turn the tables.

Laziness: A lot of Big Media types don't get out of Baghdad much to see the rest of the country where things are better. Plus, they're often still hanging around with their former "minders" from the Old Regime, who may know where to get cheap booze but who can't be expected to offer a fair picture of the regime that overthrew them.

Hysteria: The same thing that led them to overhype Hurricane Isabel -- bad but not terrible -- or for that matter shark attacks at the beach. They love bad news, because they think it sells. Funny that their viewership is shrinking, for the most part.

Euro-envy: Too many American journalists still think that their European counterparts know more. I don't know why -- it was European nations that made a mess of the Middle East to start with, and that have kept the pot boiling with their destructive support of tyrants. The BBC's anti-American bias is quite plain by now (see above). And as Tom Friedman notes in The New York Times, the French are essentially at war with us, trying to regain influence in the region. And as Sylvain Galineau observes, "France wants to get back to business as usual. For TotalFinaElf, Alcatel and the scores of French companies who coined money working for the Hussein regime for decades. As long as Paul Bremer is in charge, it won't happen. France needs someone it can bribe and sign dodgy deals with. The UN can deliver that. The US won't." Journalists are supposed to pride themselves in noticing the self-interest behind what people tell them. Why have they missed this? Because they're biased, butt-covering, lazy, hysterical, and Euro-envying. That's my guess, anyway.

All of these things reflect badly on the press. If the Jayson Blair affair was journalism's Enron, the kind of misconduct that John Burns reports is journalism's Nuremberg. With that in mind, I guess an after-the-fact cover-and-spin operation is no surprise. But they're crazy to think that people aren't noticing.


Reporters ignored atrocities to get access in Saddam's Iraq
John Leo (archive)


September 22, 2003

John Burns, the great New York Times reporter, offers us a brutally blunt assessment of how badly Western correspondents covered Saddam Hussein's regime. His report, excerpted by The Wall Street Journal and Editor & Publisher, is spreading rapidly on the Internet and is bound to have an impact on the public's already low respect for most journalists.

The compulsively candid Burns, until recently the New York Times bureau chief in Iraq, wrote his comments for the new book "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq" (The Lyons Press), a collection of first-person accounts by journalists in Iraq.

Burns, who has covered China, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan and Bosnia, says the terror of Saddam Hussein's Iraq was unmatched anywhere in the world, except perhaps by North Korea today. Iraq was a vast slaughterhouse, he says, but most Western reporters worked hard to keep the news from getting out because they were afraid of losing access or getting expelled from Iraq. The monstrous savagery of life under Saddam -- the vast tortures and up to a million dead -- was "the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents," he writes.

Burns laid some of this out earlier in the Times -- the bribes and gifts from journalists to Saddam's henchmen, with reporters turning over copies of their stories to show how friendly they were to the regime. "A rigorous system for controlling and monitoring Western journalists has been in place in Iraq for decades, based on a wafer-thin facade of civility," he wrote in the Times last April 20.

In his "Embedded" article, Burns is more caustic about the payoffs by journalists. He says big shots at the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from TV reporters, "who then behaved as if they were in Belgium." Will these unnamed TV reporters be called to account?

As an example of evasive noncoverage, Burns cites the reluctance of most reporters to say anything about Abu Ghraib prison, the heart of Saddam's reign of terror. Burns says he couldn't find a single colleague in journalism who had read the human rights reports about butchery at the prison. Last October, when President Bush's pressure caused Saddam to announce a limited amnesty at Abu Ghraib, the BBC didn't think it was worth sending anyone to the prison. Burns writes: "You had the BBC thinking it was inappropriate to go there because it means that it causes trouble." Of the reporters who did go to the prison, he says, "Ninety-eight percent of them had never heard of Abu Ghraib. Had no idea what it was."

After the amnesty turned into a mob scene and a near-riot and unofficial jail break, some groups marched to the intelligence ministry. Burns says this was a phenomenal story, an actual protest in a terrorized land, but "some of my colleagues chose not to cover that." No use reporting real news if it's going to cause any inconvenience.

"There is corruption in our business," Burns writes. "In the run-up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility." The usual rationalization by wayward correspondents is that Saddam's horrors couldn't be reported without jeopardizing the lives of sources and reporters. CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, offered that lame excuse in a notorious New York Times op-ed piece on April 11. It was a devil's handshake: CNN got to stay in Iraq; Saddam Hussein got good press.

Eason said he knew all about the beatings and electroshock torture. One woman who talked to CNN was beaten daily for months in front of her father, then torn limb from limb. Her body parts were left in a bag on her family's doorstep. But CNN's viewers hadn't been told.

Burns has no patience with excuses like Eason's. He is a reporter who was jailed for six days for his reporting in China and who risked being killed by Saddam's regime in its dying days. At one point, he wondered whether he would wind up in Abu Ghraib himself.

He says of Iraq: "We now know that this place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. They (reporters) rationalized it away."

Though President Bush chose to make weapons of mass destruction his principal argument against Saddam, Burns writes, "this war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights alone. This was a grotesque charnel house, and also a genuine threat to us. We had the power to end it and we did end it."

Even if as many as 5,000 Iraqis died in the war, Burns writes, that's fewer than would have died if Saddam's killing machine had gone on as usual during the six-week period of battle. The war should have been justified on this basis, he says, "but you'd never have known it by reading most of the coverage of the war by those correspondents."

Criticisms like this are often shrugged off as sour outbursts by conservatives who don't understand the press. What happens now that the outburst is coming from the best reporter to serve in Iraq?