Knight Ridder, Going It Alone

AJR - Going It Alone

Susan Moeller, a University of Maryland journalism professor who has studied the way various news organizations covered questions about weapons of mass destruction, says a "patriotic bounce from 9/11" is one of the best ways to explain the disparity in stories. When most of the media covered reports of WMD in North Korea, news outlets made clear the uncertainty of those claims. With Iraq, it was more or less stated as fact that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction "and the question is, 'What do we do with them?' " Moeller says.

Few, if any, covered Iraq differently, but, Moeller says, "Knight Ridder was among them."

"We felt they were ahead of the curve with some of their stories," says Carl Leubsdorf, Washington bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News and a member of the panel that judged entries for the Clapper award. "They sort of set the ball rolling about whether the CIA had provided proper information to the administration and whether the administration made proper use of it."

Strobel says it has been a "dream story" to cover. It's also the most important story any reporter can cover, Hoyt adds.

"Anytime the nation is about to go to war and commit itself to something that drastic, there ought to be a full and open examination of a case and everything ought to be out there for people to see and make judgements about," Hoyt says. "That really was not the case here."
"I think the failure of the media in general in covering this story," Landay says, "is as egregious as the intelligence failure."

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