The New York Times and Washington Post Are Ignoring Civilians Killed by U.S. Drone Strikes

Graffiti denouncing strikes by US drones in Yemen. 
Khaled Abdullah/REUTERS

Jeff Bachman, American University

The Obama administration has repeatedly claimed its drone strikes are precise and conducted in compliance with international law.

Yet, information provided to online journal The Intercept by an unnamed source paints a different picture.

The Obama administration's drone strikes have also been investigated by multiple UN Special Rapporteurs, including Philip Alston, Ben Emmerson and Christof Heyns. They have been criticized by numerous human rights NGOs, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reprieve. Stanford Law School, NYU School of Law and Columbia Law School have raised ethical and legal questions.

The dichotomy between claims made by the Obama administration and the reports by these well-respected observers should attract scrutiny by the media.

To find out what kind of job the media has been doing reporting this story, I recently completed and published a study of The New York Times' (NYT) and Washington Post's (WP) coverage of US drone strikes between 2009 and 2014.

These papers were chosen as representatives of the "elite press." The NYT calls itself the "paper of record." The WP is considered by some to be the official paper of Washington, DC. I picked this five-year period because of the dramatic increase in drone strikes that occurred since Obama took office.

My conclusion: both papers have substantially underrepresented the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, failed to correct the public record when evidence emerged that their reporting was wrong and ignored th