A team of reporters from Knight-Ridder’s Washington bureau “began hearing from sources in the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service of doubts about the arguments the [Bush] administration was making,’ bureau chief John Walcott told reporter Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books [on February 26, 2004]. …At the time, Knight-Ridder was virtually alone among national news organizations attempting to look behind the aluminum tubes [potentially being used for nuclear weapon production] story. ‘In the period before the war,’ wrote Michael Massing, ‘U.S. journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the administration. …Despite abundant evidence of the administration’s brazen misuse of intelligence in this matter, the press repeatedly let officials get away with it.’ ”
– James Bamford, A Pretext for War, Pages 326-327