Isn’t it time British papers apologised for being wrong about WMD?

Unlike British newspapers, the New York Times enjoys beating its breast. It recently published a lengthy ‘editor’s note’ which acknowledged that its coverage in the months before the invasion of Iraq ‘was not as rigorous as it should have been’. The paper conceded that ‘articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display’ while other articles that called the original ones into question were ‘sometimes buried’. Many people may regard this apology as pompous and rather absurd. But if a newspaper gives the impression that weapons of mass destruction existed in profusion, and posed a deadly threat to the West, should it not apologise when it becomes clear that they did not?

In comparison with some British newspapers, the New York Times was reasonably balanced in setting out the case for the existence of WMD. It did not state as certain fact in its editorials day after day that WMD constituted a real and present danger which did not merely justify but also necessitated invading Iraq. Whereas the New York Times was guilty of listening too credulously to the claims of the Pentagon (which had itself listened too credulously to rather dodgy Iraqi exiles), some of our own daily papers evangelised on behalf of the British government. In the months leading up to war, the Sun, the Times and the Daily Telegraph repeatedly made the case for military action on the basis that WMD existed. Now that it has become clear that they did not, at any rate on anything like the scale claimed by these newspapers, should they consider apologising for having misled their readers?

The Sun was the most outspoken of the three, admitting no doubt as to the existence of WMD, and giving no space to anyone who held a contrary view. Almost every day during the months before the war, the paper reported sympathetically, and without ever entering the smallest reservation, every British or American claim about Saddam Hussein and WMD.