Iraq

"On Sept. 29, a remarkable story appeared on the front page of The New York Times," William E. Jackson, Jr. writes in Editor & Publisher. Far down in the story there is a mea culpa for reporting by the Times' Judith Miller on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Miller's stories relied heavily on information and defectors provided by the Iraqi National Congress's Ahmad Chalabi. "Miller is not a neutral, nor an objective journalist," Jackson writes.

"Bush administration officials and U.S. news media chiefs met on a rain-swept Civil War battlefield on Wednesday to honor four American journalists who died in Iraq and Pakistan while reporting on the U.S. war on terrorism. ... Honored were Daniel Pearl ... and three journalists who traveled with U.S. fighting units in Iraq this year -- Michael Kelly of the Atlantic Monthly and Washington Post, David Bloom of NBC and Elizabeth Neuffer of the Boston Globe. ... Not mentioned were the five journalists killed by U.S.

Top Bush administration officials have been citing a pair of public opinion polls conducted in Iraq to demonstrate that Iraqis have a positive view of the U.S. occupation, but Walter Pincus points out that the polls actually show Iraqis have a less enthusiastic view than the administration has portrayed. According to one poll, "only 33 percent thought they were better off than they were before the invasion and 47 percent said they were worse off," Pincus writes.

"The British intelligence chief responsible for a pre-war dossier on Iraq's weapons dropped a key sentence from it days before publication after prompting from Downing Street," Reuters reports. "The offending sentence stated that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was prepared to use chemical and biological weapons 'if he believes his regime is under threat.'"