How Big Media Fails Us: The Latest Chapter in a Continuing Story

Not just stenography: Kaplan and Zakaria do dictation too

by Weldon Berger | Oct 10 2006 - 8:52am

Two leading journalists contributed to and kept secret a report the Bush administration used to argue for the invasion of Iraq. Newsweek senior editor Fareed Zakaria, an ardent proponent of the invasion who has now given it up as a lost cause, and Robert Kaplan, a highly touted foreign affairs journalist and another advocate of the invasion, both attended a secret meeting convened in November of 2001 by Paul Wolfowitz, then the assistant secretary of defense. The two journalists and a handful of unnamed others collaborated to produce the report that, in Kaplan's words to the New York Times, assembled "a forceful summary of some of the best pro-war arguments at the time."

Both men signed confidentiality agreements as a condition of attending the meeting. What this means is that two nationally known journalists who have together written dozens of Iraq-related stories not only knew the administration were marshalling Iraq invasion talking points barely a month after 911 but helped them do it, and then kept that information hidden from their readers even as the administration insisted until almost the moment of the invasion that no decision to attack had been made.

More here. (Emphasis added.)