As Newsweek gets rotisseried over the coals for its Koran desecration report, Democracy Now! talked to two lefty commentators on Thursday on what to do about the pre-war inaccuracies in reporting.

An excerpt from the rush transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: As we talk about the Newsweek controversy and the allegations of Koran abuse, the pressure from the U.S. government after Michael Isikoff's piece appeared. We're joined by Michael Massing, contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, board member of the Committee to Protect Journalists, author of Now They Tell Us: The American Press in Iraq. And on the line from California, Norman Solomon, who is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, author of the forthcoming book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Well, Michael Massing, let’s begin with you. Were you surprised as the Newsweek controversy started to unfold, the allegations of Koran desecration and then what came next from the Pentagon, from the White House?

MICHAEL MASSING: Well, no. It's part of a pattern that we have been seeing. You know, the press right now, I think, a lot of journalists would feel they're under attack in ways that are unprecedented, and it's not just that you have, say, a president or a presidential press spokesman criticizing the press -- you go back to President Kennedy and find that -- but there's this echo chamber out there now that has really led to such a sort of forceful coming down on the media from a variety of places, so the White House is amplified by Fox News, by the Weekly Standard, by The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Now you have the blogs that instantaneously can ramp something up to a tremendous pressure. So we are seeing this as part of a pattern, much of it clearly calculated to put the press on the defensive and make it pull back in its reporting.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about who was saying what, at the same time that you had Lawrence DiRita saying, talking about Michael Isikoff talking about that son of a blank, and basically saying that there very much was blood on hands of Newsweek? Talk about what else was being said by the government.

MICHAEL MASSING: Well, General Richard Myers, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a press conference -- actually, looked up the press conference, and it came at the very end. He was with Donald Rumsfeld, and it was when the base closings was announced, and someone at the end asked about Newsweek’s culpability, and General Myers was really, very straightforward about this. He says, “I have a general in the field, my representative in Afghanistan, and his feeling is that the Newsweek report is not at all the cause of what is happening there, that it is much more caught up in the local politics and anti-U.S. and anti-Karzai forces.” And I went back and looked at how this got reported, and it came if at all at the end of several stories, so DiRita and McClellan, their comments were getting a tremendous amount of attention, and General Myers was buried at the end of articles. I think if that had been played up more earlier that some of the statements now finally are coming around to that, as you just showed Scott McClellan saying.

AMY GOODMAN: It's pretty astounding. I mean, you have Lawrence DiRita, a Pentagon spokesperson saying, “People are dead because of what the son of a blank said, how could he be credible now?” And at the same time, he is saying, “The nature of where these things occurred, how quickly they occurred, the nature of individuals who were involved in it suggests they may be organized events that are using this alleged allegation as a pretext for activity that was already planned.”

MICHAEL MASSING: Right. And actually today on the op-ed page of the Times, Sarah Chayes, who has been in Afghanistan for three years, former NPR correspondent, gets into more depth. I mean, I have actually been shocked at the lack of reporting on what's happened over there. I would assume we would have more people like looking -- who were these organizers, what happened, just getting more information. And yet it's another case of how Afghanistan has been shoved aside because of Iraq. And so, we're left in the dark.

AMY GOODMAN: Norman Solomon, your response for starters, as this whole story unfolded.

NORMAN SOLOMON: Yes, if we're going to raise the question of how can they be credible now, then we should be talking about the entire U.S. mass media and certainly the official sources that they relied on that got us into this war on Iraq in the first place. One of the forms of deception is promotion of lies, the other is silence about key information. And we could ask now, who is dying today because of lies told, through commission, through omission, silence about key information. And also we could demand who are today the news outlets that should be retracting both their deceptions before and during and after the invasion, as well as their silences. And if you go down that road, if you are going to go into what has been opened up by Scott McClellan and Lawrence DiRita and all of those folks and raise the question of blood on their hands, then, you know, let's be clear. There's an enormous amount of blood on the hands of -- if these major media institutions can be said to have hands, The New York Times, the Washington Post, major outlets that took, on faith, statements made by the White House, Pentagon, State Department, leading into and during this war to the present time, and people are dying.

So, it's a very much an indicator of the truncated and limited range of the mass media in this country that these questions can be opened up and shut down at the same time. As it happens, we are speaking exactly one year ago today from the day, May 26, 2004, when The New York Times, long after publishing these front page articles about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, printed a 14-page “from the editor's” note finally acknowledging there was something wrong with their coverage, but even then it was a semi-apology. We haven't had any sort of real dissection in the pages of the Times or, I would argue, through the mass media in general about how the Times and the Post and other major outlets played ball with, were part of the war propaganda system of this country, that has resulted in this war.