Rosenstiel

July 16th, 2004
Transcription by Ben Tupper

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: All right. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and what you do here.
TOM ROSENSTIEL: My name is Tom Rosenstiel. I'm the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And when you look at the build-up to the war in Iraq, how do you evaluate the performance of both the print and broadcast television news media?
ROSENSTIEL: Well -- Covering the argument for whether a country should go to war is one of the most important things that the press has to do in a democratic society. It's also one of the most difficult, particularly in a situation like this where the rationale for war had a lot to do with intelligence information that was held by really only a few people in the government. The number of reporters who covered the intelligence community is really rather small. We're probably talking about 8 or 12 or no more than 20 reporters who really cover the intelligence community in a serious way, in a full-time way. So whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction. Whether or not there were ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. This is information that was in the hands of so few people. And there were so few reporters really able to assess that information that it was extremely difficult. This is not a situation in which you have governments where the information is widely distributed across a lot of people and hundreds and hundreds of reporters could assess it. A debate over Medicare and the impact of a policy on seniors across the country, hundreds of reporters can go out and work on that kind of a story. Whether or not a country has weapons-grade uranium, maybe there are half a dozen reporters who could know.