Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
Declaring "it is past time" to shine "the bright light of hindsight ... on ourselves," The New York Times assessed its pre-war and early invasion Iraq coverage as "in most cases ... an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time." The Times acknowledges there were "a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been." Editor & Publisher writes that the Times' mea culpa "does not ... go nearly far enough and is buried on Page A10," and calls it "nothing less than a primer on how not to do journalism, particularly if you are an enormously influential newspaper with a costly invasion of another nation at stake." Times editors reassured staff that their Iraq coverage assessment "is not an attempt to find a scapegoat or blame reporters."
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