Missed signals: why did it take so long for the news media to break the story of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib?(Cover Story)

American Journalism Review,  August, 2004  by Ricchiardi, Sherry

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Donald H. Rumsfeld could not pass up a chance to gloat.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

During a town hall-style meeting with Pentagon workers on May 11, the defense secretary smugly noted that it was "the military, not the media" that discovered and reported the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, a hellhole 20 miles west of Baghdad.

Rumsfeld's remarks touched a nerve.

Because, for a variety of reasons, the media were awfully slow to unearth a scandal that ultimately caused international embarrassment for the United States and cast a shadow over ...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.