Films critique coverage of Iraq war

The news industry is an inviting target in "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's cinematic assault on the war in Iraq. "Fortunately, we have an independent media," Moore intones sarcastically in the film before unleashing clips featuring patriotic pronouncements from major media figures.

In his documentary "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception," veteran journalist and media watchdog Danny Schechter accuses news outlets of creating a "prowar narrative driven by jingoism, not journalism."

Interviewed in Robert Greenwald's documentary "Uncovered: The War on Iraq," a former UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, bluntly says "the media is culpable for the misleading of the American public."

A key point in Jehane Noujaim's documentary "Control Room," which examines Al-Jazeera's coverage of the Iraq war, occurs when a US press aide concludes that the Qatar-based media outlet's Arab-centric bias is the mirror image of the Fox News Channel's blatant American nationalism.

With postwar Iraq proving to be bloody and unstable, and given the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, a reassessment of the assumptions and rationales that guided US policy has implicated the White House, the CIA, the Iraqi exile community, and the British government.

But what about the news media? Did it fail, as some critics say, in its watchdog function by not aggressively scrutinizing the White House's prewar assertions?

"There's been a lot of talk about policy failures, there has been a lot of talk about intelligence failures, but there hasn't been a lot of talk about media failures," Schechter says.

Despite a few modified mea culpas from the mainstream media, the truly potent and pointed press criticism is emanating from an unusual source.

Several new documentaries -- primarily ideological ones with strong antiwar views -- paint an unflattering portrait of the news industry as a coconspirator in the proliferation of misleading information in the run-up to the war.

"Too many in the press were failing to provide the vigorous coverage we should have," says Geneva Overholser, the former editor of The Des Moines Register, who is now a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. "What we have, it seems to me, is a kind of indictment of the press," and these filmmakers "are filling some sort of a gap."

Journalists "are finding they goofed in much the same way that everybody else did, carrying the administration's water, not wittingly, but carrying it nonetheless," adds Marvin Kalb, the former network newsman and a coeditor of the book "The Media and the War on Terrorism."

Slowly and sporadically, some mainstream media outlets have been publicly admitting problems. In late May, The New York Times published a lengthy editor's note acknowledging that it had not been sufficiently "rigorous" in examining claims that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Washington Post's ombudsman, Michael Getler, recently wrote a column asserting that too many stories challenging the administration's view had ended up inside the newspaper rather than on Page 1. In the June 28 issue of The New Republic, editors acknowledge that in backing the war in Iraq, the magazine had incorrectly assumed Hussein had an active nuclear-weapons program. And in February, Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly made headlines by allowing that he'd been wrong about Iraq's weapons arsenal.

But the new documentaries are a lot more strident in their criticism of the media, even as each takes a different approach.

"Fahrenheit 9/11," the top moneymaker last weekend, is a piece of biting commentary that takes dead aim at President Bush as well as the economic stratification of America.

"WMD," shown at the Nantucket Film Festival and slated for festival screenings in Boston, New York, and Dallas, features Schechter, a main character in the film, providing a harsh critique of TV news programs' proclivity to view the war as a boost for "ratings and revenues."

"Uncovered," which opens in New York in August, includes interviews with former government officials, CIA operatives, and military personnel who offer a stinging rebuttal to the administration's version of events in Iraq.

"Control Room," now showing across the country, is the least political of the four. it trains its lens on Al-Jazeera journalists who seem caught between their desire for journalistic objectivity and their antipathy toward US policy in Iraq.

Despite the differences, one thing the filmmakers have in common is a belief that when it came to the war, the US media primarily functioned as cheerleaders.

In a somewhat contentious interview June 21 with Katie Couric on the "Today" show, Moore said his film "is a silent plea to all of you in the news media to do your job. We need you. You're our defense against this. . . . And I just think a disservice was done to the American people."

In interviews with the Globe, the other documentarians make the same basic argument.

"The case I'm making is the mainstream media is complicit with the Bush administration in selling and promoting the war," Schechter says. "Television lives for the big event . . . and war is almost a perfect one. It's a great way of building audience and showing resolve."

Noujaim says that she tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to get American reporters to talk candidly for her film. "Many of them [privately] had very interesting things to say about the pressure they felt since Sept. 11 to be patriotic," she says. "Many of the people inside the media I spoke to . . . have said, `We screwed up.' "

Greenwald, who added a section of sharp media criticism to his film, says the media's performance "was a personal tragedy, because my faith was shattered. . . . Journalists, because they are human beings, get caught up in war fever. . . . In a defense of the media, we all were living still in a post-9/11 world. It doesn't make it OK, but it does give it context."