Warren Strobel Interview Now Posted
The Echo Chamber Project interview with Warren Strobel is now posted here.
Strobel is the Foreign Affairs Correspondent for Knight Ridder, and the primary collaborator with Jonathan Landay on their award-winning investigations into the intelligence surrounding the justifications for the war in Iraq -- described briefly here.
Simply put, Strobel and Landay are the best evidence that it was possible for journalists to dig out information that contradicted the master narrative coming from the White House, Pentagon and State Department.
Here Strobel talks about their sources, and how other major news organizations passed up on following up on important leads that their sources were trying to introduce into the public discourse.
We had people talking to us who are -- as you said "the blue collar workers" -- we tend to call them "the professionals." And when I say "professionals," I mean intelligence analysts, uniformed military and US diplomats who were expert in Iraq, expert in the Middle East, had done this stuff their whole careers. And they kept telling us over and over again that their views were being ignored, that the process was being politicized, strange things were going on, that a separate, almost alternate government was being set up, different reporting channels, and so on and so forth. And I think what happened was -- They were talking to other members of the media as well, obviously they just didn't come to Knight Ridder, but we took them a lot more seriously. We followed very aggressively on what they had to say. And in the end we found that their version of reality was more accurate than the version of reality that the White House was trying to put out.
Showing his diplomatic nature, Strobel politely asks how things might have turned out differently had other news organizations shown as much skepticism as he and his Knight Ridder team did:
And you know, it's not for me to criticize any members of the media, but you do have to wonder what would have happened if the entire media establishment in this country had taken a different stance -- from the time of let's say the end of the war in Afghanistan in December / January 2002 and the start of the invasion. Would it have changed history? Would Bush not have invaded? Would Congress not have gone along? I don't know, but it is a question worth asking.
Indeed. We'll never really know.
But other journalists have a lot to learn from how this Knight Ridder team collaborates on stories -- as well as how they're able tap into the intelligence of "the professionals" who have a much better idea what is going on, than the filtered information that is coming out from the top of the chain-of-command.
