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'Why has the WMD story been so difficult for the press to investigate and tell?'
Wapons of mass destruction WMD) have a simplistic, if errifying, presence in the public's imagination-as instruments of doom that threaten Americans where they live. Since September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and other administration officials have used WMD threats as powerful tools of public persuasion and as forceful rationales for policy initiatives. And many members of the press have stenographically reported the White House's homeland security arguments without independently attempting to verify the ostensible evidence behind those arguments.
Why has the WMD story been so difficult for the press to investigate and tell?
President Bush set the tone for an apocalyptic approach to the WMD issue, not only through his administration's insistence that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD that posed an urgent and immediate threat, but also through his identification of WMD as an integral part of the 21st century terrorist arsenal. In his "Mission Accomplished" speech onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, President Bush declared that "with the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, we have removed allies of al-Qaeda, cut off sources of terrorist funding, and made certain that no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein's regime."
In an article that appeared in The Washington Post on the day the President gave this speech, reporter Mark Leibovich noted the hyperbole: "The nation is being trained to consider terrorism only in its most apocalyptic forms," he wrote. "Many sociologists, scenario planners, and counterterrorism experts believe the government and the media are too focused on extreme menaces-namely the terrorist attacks that involve weapons of mass destruction."
Press Coverage of WMD
A recent study that I authored, "Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction," conducted by the Center for International and security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), at the University of Maryland ancl released in March, evaluated how the American and British press covered events related to weapons of mass destruction. The study assessed press coverage of WMD during three critical periods of time: May 1998, when nuclear tensions escalated between India and Pakistan; October 2002, when Congress approved military action to disarm Iraq and when revelations about the North Korean nuclear weapons...