In News Coverage and Editorials on Syria, How Much Skepticism in The Times?

Many Times readers are looking at recent news coverage of Syria, and editorials on the same subject, through the lens of another international conflict: the United States invasion of Iraq.

In many comments on articles and e-mails to the public editor, that theme emerges clearly. Readers do not want the drumbeat of war echoing from their newspaper or its online equivalent; in fact, they are highly sensitive to any hint of that, and want to see The Times be as skeptical and questioning as possible as the nation moves closer to military action.

Marc Kagan of Manhattan is one reader who is watching closely. He wrote to me several times this week with specific observations about the news and opinion offerings. On Wednesday, he complained that The Times's coverage the last few days had been ‘like déjà vu all over again,” rife with “implicit justifications” for going to war. Among the assumptions: “That the administration is telling the truth. … That the U.S. (and perhaps a handful of allies) has the moral right to intervene and to decide when and how to intervene. …That the U.S. is the ‘city on the hill,' with higher moral standards than other nations.”

He added:

There is no particular reason to assume any of these ideas (Iraq, N.S.A., drones, etc.) but they are embedded in the very essence of the reportage; as Gramsci might have said, they are the ‘common sense‘ within which the Times reporters operate. Past wars, past lies? Just aberrations, surely, with no consequence for today's policies.

Has The Times learned its much-needed lesson from the run-up to the Iraq war? Is there a conscious effort not to contribute to the drumbeat?

I talked with the managing editor Dean Baquet about this on Thursday, and to Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, on Friday. I asked both to what extent the work they are supervising â€" respectively, news stories and opinion pieces, including Times editorials â€" is influenced by an expressed desire to avoid past mistakes.

Mr. Baquet told me that the specter of Iraq is not something that has come up explicitly for discussion in meetings he has held among editors and reporters on the Syria coverage.

“I've never said, ‘Let's remember what happened with Iraq,'” he told me. “I don't think it's necessary. I haven't had to instruct the staff to ask hard questions. They are doing that.”

He added: “The press's coverage of Iraq always lurks in the background. But it was a long, long time ago.”

Syria is not another Iraq, he said â€" one of the major differences, he said, is that the Obama administration has no enthusiasm for this conflict in the way that President George W. Bush's administration did a decade ago.

“Nobody could read our coverage and say that The New York Times is trumpeting war,” Mr. Baquet added.

Some readers, though, are saying something close to that. Andrew Cholakian is one of those readers, who put it this way: “Given how deeply unpopular this conflict is among the people of this country, I find it remarkable that The Times has chosen to be little more than an administration mouthpiece. There has been no room for dissenting opinions on The Times's home page, though the comments on articles are full of them. Another Middle Eastern nation, another unsubstantiated intelligence claim, and The Times, parroting the executive branch. History repeats itself.”

Also, some commenters are making the same case, including the former International Herald Tribune reporter Patrick L. Smith in Salon.

When I asked Mr. Baquet to address this point of view, he said, “The readers are holding us to a standard, and that's good, but we've more than met that.”

Mr. Rosenthal described a different approach. When I asked him if The Times editorial board had expressly grappled with the specter of Iraq as it writes about Syria, he answered: “Absolutely. No question.”

After the falsification of intelligence leading up to Iraq, he said, “We can't ever accept at face value what we're being told.”

He said that, in editorial board meetings “we've had direct discussions about this, where we've said, ‘We're back in Iraq.'”

The sentiment, he said, was essentially this: “We gave far too much credence to the government. Let's not do that again.”

Here's my take: I've been observing The Times's Syria coverage and its editorials for many weeks, with an eye to this question. While The Times has offered deep and rich coverage from both Washington and the Syrian region, the tone cannot be described as consistently skeptical. I have noticed in recent weeks the ways that other major newspapers have signaled to their readers that they mean to question the government's assertions. For example, although it may seem superficial, The Washington Post has sent a strong message when it has repeatedly used the word “alleged” in its main headlines to describe the chemical weapons attacks.

I have also found that The Times sometimes writes about the administration's point of view in The Times's own voice rather than providing distance through clear attribution. This is a subtle thing, and individual examples are bound to seem unimportant, but consider, for example, the second paragraph of Friday's lead story. (The boldface emphasis is mine.)

The negative vote in Britain's Parliament was a heavy blow to Prime Minister David Cameron, who had pledged his support to Mr. Obama and called on lawmakers to endorse Britain's involvement in a brief operation to punish the government of President Bashar al-Assad for apparently launching a deadly chemical weapons attack last week that killed hundreds.

With the use of the word “apparently” â€" rather than directly attributing the administration, The Times seems to take the government's position at face value. It's a tiny example, of course, but in the aggregate it's the kind of thing the readers I've quoted here are frustrated about.

When The Times's news coverage does take a more distanced approach, it does so extremely well â€" perhaps nowhere better than in Thursday's front-page lead article on the administration's intelligence challenges by Mark Mazzetti and Mark Landler, with the headline “U.S. Facing Test on Data to Back Action on Syria.” That article acknowledged the influence of “botched intelligence” about Iraq and a “deeply skeptical” public, and referred to “bellicose talk” from the administration and pushback from some members of Congress.

On the opinion side, I have found The Times's editorials â€" the opinions of the editorial board - appropriately cautious. While the Op-Ed views on Syria might be faulted for not including many strong outside voices clearly making the argument against the conflict, The Times's own editorials have had a questioning tone. (Thursday's lead editorial began, “Despite the pumped-up threats and quickening military preparations, President Obama has yet to make a convincing legal or strategic case for military action against Syria.”)

The editorials have maintained a tough-minded tone in recent days, even as a United States attack on Syria seems inevitable.