“What the Hell has Happened to the News Media”

Pincus himself plans on writing a book that will be part memoir, part exploration of “what the hell has happened to the news media.” He says, however, that he has no urge to retire soon, and is eager to plug away at the Pentagon-surveillance story: “My view is, you do it in chunks. You just keep going back until it sinks in.” Sinks in not only to the public consciousness, but also the Washington bunker. Pincus is not at all shy about saying that he hopes his coverage will change the Pentagon’s behavior. “That’s what papers are about,” he insists. “That’s why you own a paper, that’s why you write for a paper.” …In future coverage, Pincus says, he will return to those crucial weeks in March 2003. He will most likely do so according to his longstanding personal rule of writing a sequence of short, 800-word articles, rather than saving his material for a gigantic Pulitzer-baiting opus. He learned that principle of incremental coverage in part, he says, from Andrew Lack, then of CBS News, in the early 1980s. “Andy came out of advertising,” he says, “and he got me thinking that what news stories on the nightly news were — if you think of them as ads — it’s the visuals, and the message, and it has to be repeated. That’s how things get through to people.”

One great advantage that Pincus had during this period was his longstanding friendship with Hans Blix, then the United Nations’ chief weapons inspector…. Consequently, Pincus and [Karen] DeYoung were able to offer a tremendous amount of detail about the tug-of-war between the UN weapons inspectors and the various arms of the Bush administration. As 2003 began, Pincus’s coverage of the Bush administration’s weapons claims was not notably skeptical. Indeed, drawing partly on Blix, Pincus often recounted the long history of Iraq’s various weapons deceptions during the early 1990s. “There was no doubt in my mind,” Pincus says, “that there was something there. You couldn’t believe there was nothing.” By March, however, the UN inspectors had done enough new searching to suggest that, improbably, the Iraqi regime actually had done away with its weapons programs. “The information pouring in over the last few weeks before the war about there not being weapons was just enormous,” Pincus says. “But how do you prove a negative?” …Pincus says his reason for returning to the administration’s case about Iraq’s weapons is not to personalize the administration’s follies — “the point is not to prove yet again the Dick Cheney overstated the case” — but to help future administrations avoid similar errors. In a February 10 page-one story, Pincus revealed that Paul R. Pillar, a former high-level CIA officer who was responsible for the agency’s Iraq assessments during the prewar period, had accused the Bush administration of cherry-picking intelligence about Iraq’s weapons. The story ended by stressing Pillar’s wish that the CIA be restructured along the lines of the Federal Reserve, which would keep the agency in the executive branch but theoretically insulate it from political meddling. Where some people might look at the current political climate in D.C. of partisan attack and recrimination and see an abyss, Pincus sees an opportunity of reform.

Pincus never wrote about Valerie Plame — in part, he says, because he already knew a fair amount about the origins of Wilson’s trip from various sources, including some in the C.I.A. He did not think it was true that Plame had arranged the trip; and even if that were so, he thought, it had little bearing on the merits or lack thereof of Wilson’s report. After Novak’s column ran, he says, “I talked to the agency people, and they said it wasn’t true.” …Pincus believes that the Bush administration acted obnoxiously when it leaked Valerie Plame’s identity, but he has never been convinced by the argument that the leaks violated the law. “I don’t think it was a crime,” he says. “I think it got turned into a crime by the press, by Joe” — Wilson — “by the Democrats. The New York Times kept running editorials saying that it’s got to be investigated — never thinking that it was going to run around and bit them.” The entire Plame investigation, he says, has been a distraction from a more fundamental conversation about how the White House handled evidence before the war.