Shock and Owe

 Film & Press · Media Criticism

When the Press Chose the Easy Story — and Why It Mattered

Rob Reiner's Shock and Awe is a film about a war. But more than that, it's a film about cowardice in the newsroom — and the few who refused to play along.

Imagine you're a reporter in 2002. The United States just suffered the worst terrorist attack in its history. The president says a foreign country has dangerous weapons that could be used again. Almost every major newspaper in the country agrees. Your editor agrees. Your colleagues agree. Do you just go along with it, or do you keep digging?

That is the central question in Shock and Awe, Rob Reiner's 2017 film about the months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The film is based on real events and real people. And the answer two reporters gave  Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder news service changed how we understand what journalism is supposed to do.

Two very different newsrooms

Most big-name news outlets in 2002 and 2003 ran with the government's story. Officials said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). They said Saddam Hussein was a threat. They connected him, vaguely, to the 9/11 attacks. Reporters printed what officials said. Editors approved the stories. The public read them and believed.

Knight Ridder was different. It wasn't a flashy outlet. It didn't have the same prestige as The New York Times or The Washington Post. But Landay and Strobel did something simple that most other reporters weren't doing: they went and talked to the people who weren't at the podium. They called mid-level intelligence analysts, weapons experts, and inspectors who had actually been to Iraq. And those people had serious doubts about the government's claims.

"They weren't smarter than everyone else. They just asked the next question — and then the one after that."— the core lesson of the film

The stories Knight Ridder published were accurate. They warned that the WMD case was weak, that the intelligence was shaky, and that the push for war was moving too fast. Almost no one paid attention at the time. The invasion happened anyway. And when no weapons were ever found, the Knight Ridder stories turned out to be right all along.

Why the press went along

It would be easy to say the other reporters were just lazy or dishonest. But the film shows a more complicated picture. After 9/11, the country was frightened and angry. Questioning the government felt, to many people, like being unpatriotic. Reporters who had close relationships with White House officials didn't want to risk losing that access by being too tough. And frankly, the story the government was telling was exciting and easy to run with.

This is one of the oldest tensions in journalism: the press is supposed to challenge the government, not act as its spokesperson. But when the government is popular, and the public wants to believe a particular story, that challenge becomes very hard to make. The reporters who do it anyway tend to get ignored, criticized, or shut out.

That's exactly what happened to Landay and Strobel. Even after their stories ran, colleagues at bigger outlets brushed them off. Readers sent angry letters. The two men were treated like they were being difficult, or worse, disloyal, or for simply doing their jobs.

Why are they the heroes here

Landay and Strobel aren't heroes in this story because they turned out to be right. They're heroes because they kept going when everyone around them said to stop. They didn't have insider access. They didn't have a famous editor backing them up. What they had was a commitment to finding actual evidence and the stubbornness to keep looking even when no one seemed to care.

For journalists, that's the real lesson. Not every story has a clear villain. Not every lie is obvious. Sometimes the most dangerous thing isn't a government that's hiding something, it's a media world that has decided it already knows the answer and stopped asking questions.

For the rest of us, regular readers and citizens, the lesson is just as important. The film is a reminder that "everyone is reporting it" doesn't make something true. The biggest news organizations in the country got this story badly wrong. That should make all of us a little more careful about which sources we trust and why.

Does any of this sound familiar today?

It should. The pressures that led to the Iraq War coverage haven't gone away. Today's reporters still rely on government sources. They still risk losing access if they're too critical. And the pressure to be first, to publish now, verify later, is even stronger in the age of social media than it was in 2002.

That doesn't mean history is simply repeating itself. But it does mean the question the film asks is still a live one: when the government is pushing a story hard, and most of your colleagues are going along with it, do you have the courage to slow down and check?

Hindsight makes the right choice seem obvious. It always does. The hard part is making it in the moment, when you don't know how the story ends, when being the person who asks "but are we sure?" means standing alone in a very loud room.

That's what Landay and Strobel did. It cost them. And it turned out to matter more than almost anything else that was published during that entire period.