When the press amplified false claims about Iraq, it failed its highest duty — and fueled a war

This article is part of The Poynter 50, a series reflecting on 50 moments and people that shaped journalism over the past half-century — and continue to influence its future. As Poynter celebrates its 50th anniversary, we examine how the media landscape has evolved and what it means for the next era of news.

The president of the United States of America climbs out of the cockpit of a Navy fixed-wing airplane that just dramatically landed on an aircraft carrier, tucks his helmet jauntily under one arm and swaggers off across the deck, saluting the troops along the way. He has the bow-legged gait of a “Top Gun” pilot, thanks to his harness and flight suit, as he proudly walks beneath a larger-than-life banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” It has the production value of a blockbuster action movie, except this is real life — sort of.

It was May 1, 2003, and President George W. Bush, whose own military record was the subject of long-standing questions, was the main character in a staged media event falsely proclaiming the end of the Iraq War.

The mainstream American press fell for it hook, line and sinker.

The photo of the triumphant president beneath that banner covered newspapers around the country, as did almost stenographic repetitions of his speech from the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

“With the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, we have removed allies of al Qaeda, cut off sources of terrorist funding and made certain that no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein’s regime,” he boldly proclaimed in a line the media repeated.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But consumers of American news media wouldn’t have known that because, for months, major U.S. newsrooms had repeatedly reported that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessed such weapons. It was a systemic breakdown of journalistic skepticism, sourcing and courage. In a post-9/11 media climate charged with fear and patriotism, the press dismissed dissenting voices, trusted government officials too easily and failed to ask uncomfortable questions. It wasn’t just a story gone wrong. It fueled a war.

The faux-ending to the Iraq War, which in reality raged until 2011 and cost tens of thousands of lives, was the culmination of a campaign to justify and promote going to war in Iraq in the first place.

A U.S. Army helicopter flys near the area after a U.S. Chinook helicopter, right, believed to be carrying dozens of soldiers to leaves abroad was struck by a missile and crashed west of Baghdad, near Fallujah, Sunday, Nov. 2, 2003, killing 13 soldiers and wounding more than 20 others, the U.S. command and witnesses reported. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

The systematic effort began in August 2002 with the formation of the White House Iraq Group. The Bush administration’s main argument for going to war with Iraq centered on the dangers posed by potential “weapons of mass destruction,” an artful term with a purposely horrifying connotation that encompassed nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The message from the White House, repeated by the American press over and over again, was unequivocal.

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Vice President Dick Cheney told a veterans gathering on Aug. 26, 2002. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

The intense media campaign began the next week, just after the 2002 Labor Day weekend. As The Washington Post later reported, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card made the strategy clear: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

Talk shows were soon saturated with the administration’s argument that the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq meant war was necessary. Cheney himself appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld argued on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the alleged weapons were an immediate threat to the American homeland.

A store attendant turns on second-hand television sets to watch the live broadcast of President Bush’s address Tuesday, March 18, 2003, in Manila, Philippines. Bush gave Iraqi President Saddam Hussein 48-hours to leave Iraq or face war. (AP Photo/Pat Roque)

In the coming weeks and months, the American mainstream press promoted and publicized this narrative. A 2004 study conducted by Susan Moeller at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland found that by October 2002, the American media was largely reiterating the Bush administration’s claims that one of the “core objectives” of the “war on terror” was to prevent terrorists from obtaining or holding weapons of mass destruction.

“Editors and owners did not feel that they had the space to attack or challenge the administration at the time, because that itself was being attacked as sort of un-American,” Moeller explained recently to Poynter. In a nation still reeling from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to question the war effort or national leaders was seen as anti-patriotic.

“There was absolutely patriotism bias in the national press,” said Wyatt Andrews, a former CBS correspondent who covered the administration and drive to war and frequently traveled with Secretary Rumsfeld on his trips to the region. “If you pressed the administration’s certainty with too high a level of aggressiveness or assertiveness, you ran the risk — and you knew it in real time — of appearing not to be a patriot.”

As a result, Regina G. Lawrence, Steven Livingston and W. Lance Bennett made the brutal assessment in their 2007 book “When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina” that “the leading U.S. news organizations had effectively become government communications channels.” The data support this assertion. Between August 2002 and March 2003, for example, The Washington Post published more than 140 front-page stories repeating administration justifications for war with Iraq, according to a report by journalist Howard Kurtz.

The media listens as President Bush speaks while meeting with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, left, in the Oval Office, Thursday, Feb. 27, 2003, at the White House. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

This was despite the fact that many national reporters, including Andrews, knew the case for weapons of mass destruction was not as open-and-shut as the administration officials were making it seem.

“We knew there was this difference between the lower-level analysts who had qualms about the intelligence and senior officials who are saying, ‘There’s enough there to make it irresponsible for us to not invade,’” Andrews said. “We in the national press, although we asked the questions, we failed to pursue those questions with the vigor and the assertiveness that the moment deserved, and we should not, and cannot make that mistake again. It was an epic American press failure, no question about it.”

A handful of journalists — including Knight Ridder’s Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay — did challenge the administration’s claims, but their warnings were largely overshadowed by louder, unquestioning coverage.

Part of the difficulty for reporters was a lack of support from management and publishers in pursuing those storylines. Even when those stories were reported, they were often buried deep in the newspaper or broadcast, almost as an afterthought.

For example, the veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus ran into difficulties printing his story questioning the administration’s “proof” of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. His editors did not want to run the story at all, and only after famed reporter and then-assistant managing editor Bob Woodward’s intervention did the story run at all. But it was buried on page A17.

The Washington Post and The New York Times both later issued apologies for their coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, specifically citing the issue of leading with administration claims and burying opposition deep into the reporting, if including it at all. But it was too little, too late.

Most news consumers are “reading the headlines, they’re reading the captions, maybe they’re reading the lead, they’re probably not going to the jump beyond the front pages or the homepages,” Moeller said. “And so the headlines really matter.”

For many reporters, and indeed for the American public, one of the culminating, confirmational moments of the push toward war in Iraq came with Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Feb. 5, 2002, speech to the United Nations in which he showed a PowerPoint presentation with photos and intelligence excerpts he said were absolute proof of Iraq’s push to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction.

Secretary of State Colin Powell addresses the United Nations Security Council Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2003, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” he proclaimed from the United Nations dais. “These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

“That was a pivotal moment for so many of us,” remembered Andrews, who covered the speech for CBS. “When you know that there is this disconnect between uncertain analysts and very certain administration officials, and here comes Colin Powell putting his imprimatur on the reliability of all this. … Powell’s credibility was such that he was literally, he was probably the only guy in Washington that I ever remember who: If he said it, it was the truth.”

But it was not the truth.

Powell would later tell PBS “Frontline’s” Jim Gilmore in 2016 that he’d been “disturbed” by the speech’s content at the time, and concerned about the accuracy of the intelligence it contained, but with support from the CIA and pressure from the White House, he went ahead with it.

The United States started airstrikes on Iraq on March 20 — just 43 days later — and invaded shortly after.

Smoke rises from the Trade Ministry in Baghdad on March 20, 2003, after it was hit by a missile during US-led forces attacks. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

Even as doubts about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq spread after post-invasion inspections found none, the American media still parroted the Bush administration line that evidence was found.

For example, in her report, Moeller pointed to a Post headline from May 31, 2003, that read: “Bush: ‘We Found’ Banned Weapons; President Cites Trailers in Iraq as Proof.”

“It was reasonably well known (at that point) to some of the beat reporters that there were real questions to whether there were weapons of mass destruction and whether they indeed were found,” Moeller said, “but the fact that President Bush said it was enough to go live with the headline on the front page of the Washington Post.”

Moeller calls that headline, and the coverage it exemplified, “very misleading in educating the American public about the fact that there was disagreement.”

“It was certainly contentious as to whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” she said. “(So) that shouldn’t have been the headline. And it probably shouldn’t have been a front-page story.”

Instead, she said the story could have been framed as uncertainty or disagreement about whether the trailers found in Iraq were, in fact, proof of the presence of weapons of mass destruction.

Eventually, the public did discover the truth. In January 2004, the former U.S. weapons inspector told Congress in no uncertain terms that “not one bit” of prewar intelligence about the weapons had been accurate. “We were almost all wrong,” he said, in a quote that reverberated around the world.

By that point, it was too late.

Members of the U.S. Marine Corps carry the casket of United States Marine Pvt. Jonathan Lee Gifford at Maranatha Assembly of God in Decatur, Ill., on April 23, 2003. Gifford, 30, was in the 1st Battalion, 2nd Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, and was killed just two days into the Iraq war. The last U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq, Sunday, Dec. 18, 2011. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman, File)

The American invasion of Iraq destabilized the country, led to a period of armed insurgency and then civil war, and ultimately killed over 4,700 allied and U.S. troops and more than one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. At home, the American public largely lost trust in the credibility of the media at all levels, according to the Pew Research Center — a shift to which the Iraq coverage almost certainly contributed.

Residents of Fallujah, Iraq look into a bullet riddled car on April 29, 2003, outside a school where U.S. soldiers fired on demonstrators the night before. The U.S. launched its invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, unleashing a war that led to an insurgency, sectarian violence and tens of thousands of deaths. (AP Photo/Ali Haider, File)

This period offers a clear reminder of the risks that arise when coverage leans too heavily on White House or other government sources.

“I think whatever the issue is, whether it’s weapons of mass destruction, whether it’s on vaccines, whether it’s on climate change, I think there’s a way for media outlets to say … we recognize that there’s a problem if we always go to the official sources first,” Moeller said.

Perhaps that is easier to practice while reporting on the daily churn of the current administration. But Andrews cautioned that journalists should remember that lesson if — and when — America is on wartime footing again.

“The press in the future has to avoid this notion that to question the administration is unpatriotic. That’s looking at it … incorrectly. The stronger move of patriotism is to demand that they absolutely justify the call to sacrifice that they’re asking of our military and our civilian population,” Andrew said.

“America will be challenged again. You can almost guarantee that. And when that debate comes up, when we are on the verge of asking our young men and women to go anywhere around the world and potentially sacrifice their lives in defense of the country, the press has more of a duty to question authority than it does during normal times.”

A woman visits a grave in Section 60, where many soldiers from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are buried, Thursday, July 29, 2010, at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)