WASHINGTON, 13 August 2004 — 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 US invasion of Iraq.
In the story published yesterday 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.”
