I’m just back from ten days’ vacation, mostly spent pounding away on the book that my wife and I are working on about women in the developing world. So I didn’t weigh in on the dispute about Scott McLellan’s new book and whether the press rolled over in the run-up to the Iraq War. Katie Couric notably sided with the critics, saying it was “one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism.”

In The Washington Post, Ari Fleischer offers his own take, which was that the press did indeed do its job:

At the risk of agreeing with one of my toughest protagonists in the briefing room — NBC’s David Gregory — the press was tough, plenty tough. I have the scars — and the transcripts — to prove it…. The press did ask the hard questions, repeatedly. Based on the CIA’s conclusions, many of the president’s and my answers turned out to be wrong, but you can’t blame the press for either the CIA’s reporting or decisions reached by the president. It’s important to recognize that regardless of the outcome of the war in Iraq — an outcome still being written — the press didn’t cause it to happen or otherwise enable it.

My take is different. I think we in the press were indeed too docile in the aftermath of 9/11, although I think that is partly explained by the lack of Democratic Party opposition to White House policies at the time. We in the press tend to cover disputes, and so if Democratic senators had stood up to criticize these policies, we would have done our job better. But when the opposition party has rolled over and there’s no dispute to cover, then the news media’s role becomes more complicated.

More broadly, the standard criticism of the press has to do with Iraqi WMD, and there I think some of the critique is misdirected. Sure, we should have been more skeptical in our tone, but since the senior Clinton administration foreign policy team all thought that there was WMD in Iraq I’m not sure the coverage would have felt much different to the average reader.

Where I don’t think we’re adequately scolded has to do with the attitude of the Iraqi people. No amount of journalism could have proved that Iraq didn’t have WMD, but we could have done a much better job conveying the fact that ordinary Iraqis didn’t want a U.S. invasion. They hated Saddam but also hated the idea of “liberation” by U.S. troops, and planned to welcome us not with flowers but with bullets. That was relevant information that was entirely gettable; it was obvious to anyone reporting in Iraq or the region, and indeed some reporters did convey that. But overall American news coverage didn’t adequately convey the hostility among Iraqis to the U.S. invasion and the anger that it would inspire, and the American invasion was premised partly on the false notion that Iraqis were going to welcome us. We should have done a better job pushing back at that spin from the White House.

That’s my take. What’s yours?