The American Journalism Review has a story up on the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers. Knight Ridder owns a bunch of local, smaller market newspapers and unfortunately do not drive the conventional wisdom and news narratives like the behemoths in NY and DC. KR was just sold and the new owner is intending on keeping it intact, especially their Washington Bureau which has an excellent track record of getting recent news right. By now it is common wisdom that the pre-war intelligence the hawks were pushing was shoddy and that Ahmad Chalabi and the INC were supplying a lot of this bad intelligence the hawks kept pushing. Knight Ridder reported that before the war. They also reported senior intelligence and military officers had a lot of doubts about the Iraq intelligence but were being ignored. They keep getting there before the NY Times and the Washington Post and they keep getting it right. Unlike the Times they didn't have to write a 13,000 word correction two years later. They didn't have to explain how that the aluminum tubes the Administration was claiming were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs" were, in fact, the wrong length, the wrong width, and the wrong thickness for a centrifuge. Oh, and also, they were covered with a special coating that would have to be completely milled off.
Why did KR get it right, when most others were getting it spectacularly wrong? They weren't playing the Washington game of "exclusives," of getting access to official sources and anonymous quotes. The aluminum tubes story is a perfect example of the NY Times being spun like a top by its anonymous sources
When I ask Walcott about the bureau's philosophy, he says, "It's an impulse, when you're told something, not simply to write it down and report it but to ask whether it's true. The whole truth. And that's an impulse that I think rightly covers everything everybody here does."
Along with haste, sensationalism, and a host of others, a cardinal sin of the American media, is competitive jealousy. They are loathe to credit a big story to a competitor. So readers of the Washington Post or NY Times would not be aware of the battle over intelligence that Knight Ridder was reporting.
If you want some of the best news coverage in the US check out the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau website.
Why did KR get it right, when most others were getting it spectacularly wrong? They weren't playing the Washington game of "exclusives," of getting access to official sources and anonymous quotes. The aluminum tubes story is a perfect example of the NY Times being spun like a top by its anonymous sources
When I ask Walcott about the bureau's philosophy, he says, "It's an impulse, when you're told something, not simply to write it down and report it but to ask whether it's true. The whole truth. And that's an impulse that I think rightly covers everything everybody here does."
Along with haste, sensationalism, and a host of others, a cardinal sin of the American media, is competitive jealousy. They are loathe to credit a big story to a competitor. So readers of the Washington Post or NY Times would not be aware of the battle over intelligence that Knight Ridder was reporting.
If you want some of the best news coverage in the US check out the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau website.