Plenty of culprits have been blamed for the United States' decision to invade Iraq. The president's decision-making, hawkish cabinet members, and a suppliant Congress are all near the top of that list.
But not far behind in the minds of many commentators sits the so-called "fourth branch of the government": a mass media that largely failed to challenge the government in Iraq.
That is the issue - the role of media in American democracy - that will be on the table when a dozen of the country's most prominent journalists file into the Heights Room Saturday as part of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities annual symposium.
The event, titled "No News is Bad News," will be the fourth such event, all having been held at Boston College. The symposium, which runs with three hour and a half sessions from 12:30 to 5 p.m., is free and open to the public, including all BC students.
"Our foundation is all about strengthening civic life through the humanities, and the press is an absolutely essential part of civic life," said David Tebaldi, executive director of the foundation. "If the press is failing its responsibility, then civic life suffers as a result."
The list of panelists reads like a who's who of American journalism, with three Pulitzer Prize-winners among the reporters and editors from The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, and Atlantic Monthly.
The topics at the event could hardly be more timely. The media has come under attack financially thanks to challenges from new media, and has been criticized for failing in its public service role, particularly during the buildup to the war in Iraq.
"I didn't become a journalist to change the world," said Vanity Fair political reporter Todd Purdum, one of the event's panelists. "But I do think the current circumstances of our country shows how important it is to have reliable information and a robust media that is critical of our government."
Purdum started as a city hall reporter for The New York Times before moving on to cover the White House and then serve as Los Angeles bureau chief. Vanity Fair recruited Purdum to beef up its national political coverage, and he's repaid them with articles on John McCain, Dick Cheney, and the Bush administration this year.
He says that access to information has never been tighter than under the Bush administration, and that it has helped make the job of the journalist that much harder - and that much more important.
Purdum will be joined on his panel on political reporting by former President Clinton's press secretary during his impeachment trial, Joe Lockhart, and New Yorker reporter Margaret Talbot.
But the event's most star-studded group will be its opening panel on war reporting. Samantha Power, Harvard professor and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell: American and the Age of Genocide, is also a columnist for Time magazine and one of the leading experts on the genocide in Sudan.
She'll be joined by another Pulitzer Prize-winner, Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid who has covered the Middle East and the war in Iraq.
They'll all be looking to answer one fundamental question: What role - positively or negatively - can the press play in American democracy?
"The press has been economically beleaguered, beleaguered from the left and right, and beleaguered by government attempts to limit the flow of information," said Purdum. "It's a fundamentally troubling topic that doesn't have easy answers."
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