From The Nation
By John Nichols

While most mainstream media outlets earned the scorn that has been heaped upon them for their stenographic reporting of the Bush Administration’s prewar claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, one newspaper chain’s Washington bureau was consistently–and, it turns out, correctly–skeptical of the White House. Before the war began, Knight Ridder’s small but able team of reporters was the exception to a bad rule, producing a steady stream of now widely praised articles with headlines that referred to the “Failure to find weapons in Iraq” and “Troubling questions over justification for war in Iraq.”

But the war that might have been averted by more skeptical reporting from the rest of the media will outlast Knight Ridder. Pressed by investors who grumbled about the company’s putting too much money into journalism and returning too little profit, Knight Ridder sold out to the California-based McClatchy chain, which paid $4.5 billion and then announced it would auction off, by summer, a dozen Knight Ridder papers, including eight represented by the Newspaper Guild. The end of Knight Ridder, whose thirty-two newspapers–including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Akron Beacon Journal and the San Jose Mercury News–had earned a combined eighty-four Pulitzer Prizes, illustrates the peril of practicing the craft of journalism in times like these. No conspiracy took Knight Ridder down; it was Wall Street’s line that profit margins of 19 or 20 percent–which the chain posted in recent years–no longer suffice.

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