Landay

Here's
an interview with Jeff Jarvis of buzzmachine.com on May 16, 2005 talking about the future of media and issues surrounding the military intervention in Iraq. Also features quotes from Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder at the end.

(12:17 / 3.7 MB / Subscribe to Interview Audio)

Click here to listen to the MP3

The Echo Chamber Project interview with Jonathan Landay is now posted here.

The Knight Ridder team of Landay, Warren Strobel and John Walcott have continued to scoop major news organizations in investigating the intelligence surrounding the war in Iraq.

Here's a compilation of their stories. And this blog post provides a timeline on the pre-war reporting on the doubts surrounding whether the Aluminum Tubes could be used for uranium enrichment (i.e. nuclear weapons development).

Jim Lobe, the Washington Bureau chief for Inter Press Service, describes how the mainstream media could have performed during the build-up to the war in Iraq:

The media had a lot of options as to how it was going to cover the run-up to what was almost certainly going to be a war. And they could have done as Knight Ridder did, which was really putting a lot of investigative resources and good people into finding out what was going on behind the scenes -- Why were we going to war? What was the root of all of this? What was going on in the Pentagon in terms of doing the strangest things with intelligence? What was outside of kind of accepted rules of institutional behavior that made this so extraordinary? Or they could decide, as most of the media did, that they would really get involved in kind of the mechanics of war preparation -- Embedding their journalists into parts of the Army that would then be involved in the invasion. And obviously the latter was the easier course.

March 24, 2004
Transcription by Volunteer Citizen Journalist Paul Jamieson

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself Knight Ridder.
JONATHAN LANDAY: My name is Jonathan Landay. I'm a senior correspondent for Knight-Ridder -- cover National Security Affairs.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay, and how many newspapers does Knight-Ridder -- ?
LANDAY: Thirty-one.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay -- Hold on. When I'm going to be asking questions, if you could answer in a full sentence as if -- Yeah.