Autumn 2002: US Media Pressures Commentator on Iraq to Support Bush Administration’s Policies

David Albright, a respected nuclear physicist who had investigated Iraq’s nuclear weapons program after the first Gulf War, frequently appears as a commentator on television in the autumn of 2002. In 2004, he will say, “I felt a lot of pressure” from journalists “to stick to the subject, which was Iraq’s bad behavior.… I always felt the administration was setting the agenda for what stories should be covered, and the news media bought into that, rather than take a critical look at the administration’s underlying reasons for war.” On one occasion, Albright appears on an unnamed cable news show and says that he feels UN weapons inspections in Iraq should continue and that the impasse over Iraq is not simply France’s fault. During a commercial break, the host “got really mad and chastised me.” Albright concludes: “The administration created a set of truths, then put up a wall to keep people within it. On the other side of the wall were people saying they didn’t agree. The media were not aggressive enough in challenging this.” [New York Review of Books, 2/26/2004]