VERY few major papers or chains did anything but genuflect and take the phony baloney from the cheney machine and simply swallow it and shit it out onto their front pages without bothering to ask too many questions or dig into any truths. The Knight Ridder papers weren't fooled much, either.

The New York Times, on the other hand, was TOTALLY owned at that time. A wholly-owned subsidiary of the Vice President's info-manipulation machine. A literal dumping ground of bush/cheney lies about the war and about Saddam Hussein and the effort to sweep up everything about 9/11 and blame it all on Iraq. cheney would drop nice tasty little dog biscuits on his little pet Judith Miller, and she'd dutifully write it all up, attribute it to unnamed sources high up in the administration who didn't want to be identified. NO DUH! They were mainly cheney! Then her latest big story would land on the front page of the New York Times Sunday edition, usually two-columns above the fold, and then cheney and his little band of liars (rummy, wolfie, contradicta, etc) would fan out across the Sunday morning news shows and spread the story, with the inevitable "it's the FRONT PAGE STORY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES!!!!!!!OMG!!!!!!!OMG!!!!!!!" NO DUH! The story cheney had planted with Judith Miller, a day or so earlier. Like a news Mobius strip from Hell.