By Robert Parry
June 2, 2004

The New York Times has won some praise for admitting that it “fell for misinformation” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and for publishing an ombudsman report concluding that “the failure was not individual, but institutional.” Still, both critiques miss the fundamental reason why the Times and most other U.S. media outlets failed the country in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Ombudsman Daniel Okrent identified five main reasons for the failure at the Times: "hunger for scoops," "front-page syndrome," "hit-and-run journalism," "coddling of sources," and "end-run editing." Essentially, Okrent concluded that editors lost control of their competitive juices and thus lowered the newspaper’s journalistic standards. His analysis has a superficial appeal because it seems hard-hitting in the context of how news rooms supposedly operate.

But Okrent’s critique on May 30 and the editors' correction on May 26 ignore the elephant sitting in the middle of the American journalistic living room: For a variety of reasons – including fear – major U.S. news outlets have given a conservative slant to the news, systematically, for much of the past quarter century. Mainstream journalists simply are afraid to go against how conservatives want the news presented. Otherwise, they risk getting denounced as "liberal" or even "anti-American" and seeing their careers suffer.

Working journalists recognize that there is far less pressure from the left, certainly nothing that would endanger their careers. Plus, they know that many of their senior editors and corporate executives personally favor Republican positions, especially in international affairs.

So, out of self-interest and self-protection, journalists tilt their reporting to the right, all the better to pay their mortgages, put their kids through school, and get invited to some nifty Washington parties. Especially on national security issues, no one wants to get labeled a “blame-America-firster,” in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s memorable phrase, or in the case of Iraq, “a Saddam sympathizer.”

Is this the way it works?