Brice, please tell me why and where is the press so liberal and anti-bush?
Denys, you could answer too  <smile off>

Washington Post Says Iraq Coverage Flawed Thu Aug 12, 8:58 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Editors at The Washington Post acknowledge they underplayed
stories questioning President Bush's claims of the threat posed by Saddam
Hussein in the months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In the story published Thursday in the newspaper, Post media critic Howard
Kurtz writes that editors resisted stories that questioned whether Bush had
evidence that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

"We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for
not pushing harder," assistant managing editor Bob Woodward says in the
story. "We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for
this was shakier" than many believed.

Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks told Kurtz, "There was an attitude
among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all
this contrary stuff?"

Executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. said, "We were so focused on trying to
figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the
same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and
were questioning the administration's rationale."

In his more-than-3,000-word story, Kurtz writes, "The result was coverage
that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks
strikingly one-sided at times."

A number of critics have faulted the American news media for not being more
skeptical about the Bush administration's claims before the beginning of
the war in March 2003. In the year and a half since Saddam was toppled,
U.S. troops have yet to discover any weapons of mass destruction.

In a study published in March by the Center for International and Security
Studies at the University of Maryland, researchers wrote: "If the White
House acted like a WMD story was important, ... so too did the media. If
the White House ignored a story (or an angle on a story), the media were
likely to as well."

In May, The New York Times criticized its own reporting on Iraq, saying it
found "a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it
should have been" and acknowledging it sometimes "fell for misinformation"
from exile Iraqi sources.

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