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MEDIA - LIARS/SPINNERS INC.
This section explores media bias, incompetence, fraud
and journalistic malpractice
U.S. MEDIA and the
SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR
Part I: The New York Times
5/31/04
What was exceedingly
clear about the Iraq war a long time ago is now apparently becoming
"clear" to some of the media "elite" in the United
States. A particular case, worth examining, is that of the New York
Times. The Times is, for better or worse, considered a leading newspaper
in this country and an influential one at that, because its newsrooms
and reporting do influence news coverage across the country. Given that,
it is important to understand how this newspaper responded to the Bush
administration's "marketing"
of the Iraq invasion (war) to the people of the United States, and how
it is dealing with the repercussions of what was/is one of the most
expensive (in dollars and lives) fraudulent/deceptive
acts perpetrated on the American people.
More than anything else, to me, this page
is a personal reference for the future. It is an important reminder of
what happens when the media become largely divorced from what ought to
be the principal reason for their existence - objective and truthful
journalism. Of course, it is hardly my suggestion that media should
not set profits as a goal (from a business standpoint). After all,
without adequate profitability, it is hard to sustain good journalism.
But when an over-emphasis on profits (via front page
"exclusives"), was combined with a misplaced sense of
"patriotism" since 9/11 (which is an overly generous
characterization of the mainstream media's long-standing willingness to
be part of the Bush administration's "coalition of the
willing"), and a desire to be considered "not liberal" in
the eyes of powerful conservatives and right-wing organizations and
media, the result was not likely to be "journalism". Thus,
this
deadly mixture, as expected, produced a combustible product, the impact
of which has just started to filter through to the powers-that-be in the
mainstream U.S. media today.
What happened at the New York Times is
merely a symptom of all that started to go wrong with American
journalism since the early 1990s. Lest this page provides a misleading picture,
by first covering the Times' conduct here it is not my intention to
portray the Times as somehow being the worst offender on the Iraq war. Rather, it is
intended to show two separate things. One, that if the so-called
"liberal media" in this country behaved like this, one can
only imagine how the conservative media cheer-led during this time
period. Two, to remind people of what
he said.
Since the early 1990s, the New York Times
has systematically destroyed its reputation as a newspaper, by
willingly, and sometimes brazenly, participating in one fake witch-hunt
after another. Put generously, it became a willing pawn in the hands of the Republican/GOP
power machine (a convenient short-form that I use to describe a
group that comprises of deceptive
or downright fraudulent right-wing media, foundations and key
Republican members of Congress) - a machine that has over the
years become honed to systematically deceive the vast majority of the
American public. Put somewhat more objectively, the Times' management
indulged in one piece of journalistic malpractice after another. (Some
clarifications: I am referring here largely to the Times' coverage
on issues that have significant political impact or overtones. My
statement does not mean that the Times did not cover some issues or
topics with reasonable objectivity and respect for the truth. Clearly,
if the Times practiced real journalism, that in itself should not be a
reason for critics to necessarily applaud it - for, simply doing one's
job should not be a reason for accolades in a normal world). Reminding
ourselves about the Times' past "journalism" that was
similarly or more spectacularly lacking (compared to its Iraq coverage)
is therefore worthwhile because it provides additional context to what
happened.
This page, therefore, addresses three
aspects:
1. HISTORY: The New York Times,
before the year 2001
2. IRAQ: The New York Times'
coverage of the Iraq war (prior to May 2004)
3. THE FUTURE: The New York Times'
position today and what it portends for the future
CONCLUSION
1. HISTORY: The Times political
coverage before the year 2001
This section is sub-divided into two
parts. The first part covers the Times' coverage of the
Clinton-Gore administration and the second addresses its coverage
of Al Gore in Election 2000.
A.
The Times' coverage of the Clinton/Gore administration
In my opinion, the Times' coverage of the
Clinton administration (especially Whitewater) perhaps constituted a nadir in the integrity and quality of its journalism, even more than its
coverage of the Iraq war. The reason is that at least in the context of
the Iraq war, there has been an attempt made to slightly balance the
coverage with facts (mostly belatedly).
A number of good books have been written
documenting the role (read, malpractice) of the mainstream and right-wing
media in promoting numerous fake scandals during the Clinton
administration's reign. The one I recommend the most is The
Hunting of the President, written by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons.
More than any other book, it documents how the media allowed itself to
get trapped in political muckraking in the first place, and became a
significant "original" contributor to it subsequently, with a
premium placed on sensationalism over truth. The New York Times' role in
hunting Bill and Hillary Clinton is well described by the book. Of
course, I am also looking forward to the documentary
based on the book - which is probably expected to hit theatres in
the U.S. in late Summer/Fall 2004. Three other books are also worth
reading, in this context - Sidney Blumenthal's The
Clinton Wars, David Brock's Blinded
by the Right and Gene Lyons' Fools
for Scandal.
The specific role played by the Times
(especially its "star" reporter Jeff Gerth) in
pumping up the fake "Whitewater scandal" is briefly examined
by Gene Lyons in this
Harper's article. This is worth reading because it epitomizes the
era and the Times' participation in it.
So how did we get here?
Well, at the expense of shocking you, dear reader, it all began with
the New York Times--specifically with a series of much-praised
articles by investigative reporter Jeff Gerth: groundbreaking,
exhaustively researched, but not particularly fair or balanced stories
that combine a prosecutorial bias and the art of tactical omission to
insinuate all manner of sin and skulduggery. Accompanied by a series
of indignant editorials, Gerth's work helped create a full-scale media
clamor last December for a special prosecutor. Testimony in recent
Senate hearings showed that the Resolution Trust Corporation's
Whitewater investigation began in direct response to the Times
coverage; the hearings themselves resulted in large part from the
Clinton Administration's panicky reaction to reporters' queries about
the RTC probe, Gerth's among them. Absent the near-talismanic role of
the New York Times in American journalism, the whole complex of
allegations and suspicions subsumed under the word
"Whitewater" might never have made it to the front page,
much less come to dominate the national political dialogue for months
at a time. It is all the more disturbing, then, that most of the
insinuations in Gerth's reporting are either highly implausible or
demonstrably false.
...
The theory implicit in Gerth's Times stories may be summarized as
follows: when his business partner and benefactor McDougal got in
trouble, Bill Clinton dumped the sitting Arkansas securities
commissioner and appointed a hack, Beverly Bassett Schaffer. He and
Hillary then pressured Bassett Schaffer to grant McDougal special
favors--until the vigilant feds cracked down on Madison Guaranty,
thwarting the Clintons' plan. This is the Received Version of the
Whitewater scandal as it first took shape in the pages of the New York
Times--what all the fuss is ultimately about. And it bears almost no
relation to reality.
The distortions begin with the headline of the original Gerth story in
the Times: CLINTONS JOINED S.&L. OPERATOR IN AN OZARK REAL-ESTATE
VENTURE. This headline was misleading because when Bill and Hillary
Clinton entered into the misbegotten partnership to subdivide and
develop 230 forested acres along the White River as resort property in
1978, Jim McDougal wasn't involved in the banking and S&L
businesses at all. He was a career political operative--a former aide
to Senators J. William Fulbright and John L. McClellan. In the
meantime, McDougal had done well in the inflation-fueled Ozarks land
boom of the Seventies. But it wouldn't be until five years later--by
which time the Whitewater investment was already moribund--that he
bought a controlling interest in Madison Guaranty.
Details, details. Gerth wrote that McDougal quickly built Madison
"into one of the largest state-chartered associations in
Arkansas." Wrong again. Among thirty-nine S&Ls listed in the
1985 edition of Sheshunoff's Arkansas Savings and Loans, Madison
ranked twenty-fifth in assets and thirtieth in amount loaned. These
errors of detail might be forgiven if Gerth had in fact uncovered a
conspiracy between the Clintons and the Arkansas securities
commissioner to treat Jim McDougal leniently. The appearance of
conspiracy, however, was created not by the actions of the alleged
parties but by selective reporting.
Consider, for example, Gerth's treatment of the appointment of Beverly
Bassett Schaffer as Arkansas securities commissioner in his March 8,
1992, article: "After Federal regulators found that Mr.
McDougal's savings institution, Madison Guaranty, was insolvent,
meaning it faced possible closure by the state, Mr. Clinton appointed
a new state securities commissioner...." The clear implication is
that in response to a Federal Home Loan Bank Board report dated
Januuary 20, 1984, suggesting that Madison might be insolvent, Clinton
in January 1985 installed Bassett Schaffer as Arkansas securities
commissioner for the purpose of protecting McDougal.
So how come he waited an entire year? In reality, the timing of
Bassett Schaffer's appointment had nothing to do with the FHLBB
report, which there's no reason to think Clinton knew about. (The
Clintons had no financial stake in Madison Guaranty, although that,
too, has been obscured.) The fact is that Bill Clinton had to find a
new commissioner in January 1985 because the incumbent, Lee Thalhiemer,
had resigned to reenter private practice. Appointed by Republican
Governor Frank White and kept on by Clinton, Thalhiemer says he told
Gerth this in an interview, and describes the Times version as
"unmitigated horseshit."
Bassett Schaffer strenuously insists that to this day she has never
met McDougal, never heard Bill Clinton mention his name, and does not
believe he influenced her appointment--and told Gerth so. She had
actively sought the job from the moment she learned that Thalhiemer
was quitting (he confirms recommending her to Clinton). She herself
had volunteered in Clinton's 1974 congressional campaign and had
worked for him full time on the Arkansas attorney general's staff
while in law school. And her brother, Woody Bassett, also a
Fayetteville attorney, was a personal friend and supporter of Bill
Clinton.
The claim that Jim McDougal was behind Bassett Schaffer's appointment
rests entirely on the word of McDougal himself, a victim of
manic-depressive illness whose lawyer filed an insanity plea in a 1990
bank-fraud trial in U.S. District Court, in which McDougal was
ultimately found not guilty. In his original 1992 article, Gerth had
acknowledged McDougal's history of emotional illness but described him
as "stable, careful and calm." By 1993 mention of those
difficulties had all but vanished from the pages of the New York
Times--despite the fact that the supposed recipient of Bill Clinton's
largess was living in Arkadelphia in a trailer on SSI disability
payments. Also unmentioned, for what it's worth, was that McDougal had
long since recanted his accusations against Clinton and taken to
blaming the whole mess on Republican partisans in the RTC.
...
When I asked him recently about the discrepancies and omissions in his
reporting, Jeff Gerth stood his ground, alternately argumentative and
defensive, and did not wish to be quoted. He argues, for example, that
he never literally wrote that Jim McDougal had in fact gotten Bassett
Schaffer the job, merely that he'd claimed to. Her denial struck him
as beside the point. In other instances, he pleaded limitations of
time and space.
...
The same faults that mar Jeff Gerth's reporting on
Whitewater--misleading innuendo and ignorance or suppression of
exculpatory facts--also showed up in the Times accounts of Hillary
Rodham Clinton's commodity trades with Springdale attorney Jim Blair
and her husband's dealings with Tyson Foods. "During Mr.
Clinton's tenure in Arkansas," Gerth wrote near the top of his
March 18, 1994, front-page account, "Tyson benefited from a
variety of state actions, including $9 million in government loans,
the placement of company executives on important state boards and
favorable decisions on environmental issues." The alleged $9
million in loans was the implied quid pro quo for old pal Blair's
generous tips to Hillary in the 1970s that helped her turn $ 1,000
into nearly $ 100,000.
Following Gerth's report, the incriminating $9 million figure appeared
virtually everywhere. The Times itself weighed in with a March 31
editorial called "Arkansas Secrets," attacking the
"seedy appearances" of Bill and Hillary Clinton's
"extraordinary indifference to...the normal divisions between
government and personal interests." The same editorial went on to
deride what it called "the Arkansas Defense": that "you
cannot apply the standards of the outside world to Arkansas, where a
thousand or so insiders run things in a loosey-goosey way that may
look unethical or even illegal to outsiders." Nor have Times
editorial writers been the only ones to scold the Clintons for
succumbing to the lax moral climate of the president's native state.
The Baltimore Sun, Spiro Agnew's hometown paper, opined that the First
Lady's adventures in the cow trade "certainly don't smell right,
especially considering that Jim Blair represented a giant, influential
agribusiness firm in Arkansas that later received what seemed to be
favors from Gov. Clinton."
Newsweek's Joe Klein wrote of the President's
"multiple-personality disorder," involving a moderate
Clinton, a liberal Clinton, and "the likely suspect in the
Whitewater inquiry, a pragmatic power politician who did whatever
necessary to get and keep office in Arkansas...granting low-interest
loans to not-very-needy business interests, who in turn contributed
generously to his political campaigns. This Clinton snuggled up close
to the Arkansas oligarchs, the bond daddies and chicken pluckers--and
never quite escaped the orbit of the shadowy Stephens brothers, Witt
and Jackson." (Witt Stephens has been dead for three years, and
Jack Stephens is a Reagan Republican who has bankrolled nearly every
Clinton opponent--except Sheffield Nelson--since the early 1980s.)
There's just one problem with this chorus of self-righteous
denunciation: the $9 million in loans that inspired it never existed.
Especially attentive readers of the New York Times may have noticed an
odd little item in the daily "Corrections" column on April
20, 1994:
An article on March 18 about Hillary Rodham Clinton's commodity trades
misstated benefits that the Tyson Foods company received from the
state of Arkansas. Tyson did not receive $9 million in loans from the
state; the company did benefit from at least $ 7 million in state tax
credits, according to a Tyson spokesman.
Gerth blames a chart misread on deadline.
But was the Times embarrassed? Hardly. In the journalistic equivalent
of double jeopardy, the Times editors, having convicted Hillary
Clinton on a spurious charge, decided she was guilty of a new charge:
helping Tyson Foods to that $ 7 million in tax credits. No sooner had
she held her April 22 press conference on Whitewater-related issues
than the Times fretted that the First Lady's performance had been
smooth but cleverly evasive. Particularly suspicious, an April 24
editorial found, were her dealings with Jim Blair, "a lawyer for
Tyson Foods, a large company that was heavily regulated by and
received substantial tax credits from the Arkansas government."
Emphasis added. And people call the President slick!
The truth is far less lurid. The $7 million in investment tax credits
Tyson Foods claimed against its Arkansas state tax bill after
1985--that is, between seven and fourteen years after Hillary's
commodity trades--were written into the state's revenue code and were
never Bill Clinton's to bestow or withhold. True, the Clinton
Administration did sponsor the 1985 legislation that created the tax
credits. It did so under strong pressure, not from Tyson but from
International Paper, which threatened to take its processing plants
elsewhere unless Arkansas matched tax breaks available from other
states--a potentially severe economic blow to the already poor
southern half of the state. Far from being unique to Arkansas, state
investment tax credits are now the rule from sea to shining sea. One
week after the Times made its lame correction, Tyson announced the
opening of a new plant in Portland, Indiana. According to a press
release by Indiana Governor Evan Bayh, the state and local governments
provided some $9 million in economic incentives--approximately equal
to what Tyson got from Arkansas during Bill Clinton's six terms.
Elsewhere, nearly every bit of evidence cited as proof of shady
connections between the Clintons and Tyson Foods in the Times March
18, 1994, front-page story got the familiar Gerth treatment. Besides
the imaginary $9 million in loans, Gerth cited several other
suspicious transactions, among them a bitter court battle over
polluted groundwater in the town of Green Forest in which the Clinton
Administration "failed to take any significant action," and
a pair of seemingly tainted appointments--including renaming a Tyson
veterinarian to the state Livestock and Poultry Commission and Jim
Blair to the University of Arkansas board. An objective account of the
court battle would have pointed out that the city of Green Forest was
itself a defendant in the same lawsuit. Bill Clinton was not.
Officials of the Arkansas Department of Pollution Control and Ecology
testified for the plaintiffs against Tyson Foods. So much for yet
another dark Clintonian conspiracy.
...
All of this raises the really interesting question at the heart of the
Whitewater scandal: why--with representatives of the vaunted national
press camped out in Little Rock for weeks at a time, squinting over
aged public documents and pontificating nightly at the Capital Hotel
bar--has nobody blown the whistle on Gerth and the New York Times?
There are several reasons, ambition and fear among them. It is always
safest to run with the pack, and editors who invest thousands of
dollars on a scandal don't normally want to hear that there's no
scandal to be found. Reporters who have challenged aspects of the
official version, like Greg Gordon and Tom Hamburger of the
Minneapolis Star Tribune and John Camp of CNN, have not found their
celebrity enhanced. Those who have tried to split the difference, like
the reporters for Time magazine--which has always reported (albeit
parenthetically) that Arkansas bank regulators treated Madison
Guaranty sternly--have ended up producing accounts as muddled and
self-referential as a John Barth novel. "The dealings in
question," Time's George Church wrote last January 24, "are
so complex that it is difficult even to summarize the suspicions they
arouse, let alone cite the evidence supporting such suspicions. ...
Violations of law, if any, would be extremely difficult to
prove." And people call Clinton mealymouthed.
Regional bias and cultural condescension play a part, too. How could
the New York Times be wrong and the Arkansas Times be right? But even
if Bill Clinton had been governor of Connecticut instead of Arkansas,
in the post-Watergate, post-everythinggate culture no reporter wishes
to appear insufficiently prosecutorial--particularly not when the
suspects are the President and his wife. By definition they've got to
be guilty of something; it may as well be Whitewater.
Another "scandal" hyped by the
Times was the Wen Ho Lee affair. This was another egregious piece of
"journalism" - which did in the end elicit an apology of sorts
from the Times. Guess who the "star" reporter was in
that case? Jeff Gerth! Of course, there were others as well.
As Eric Boehlert wrote in Salon.com:
How big a mess had
the New
York Times' coverage of the Wen
Ho Lee spy case become for the paper of record? So big that its
editors created a
whole new forum to explain it to its readers.
Tuesday, on page A-2, the Times ran its first ever
"assessment," in which its editors revisited the paper's controversial
work in the Lee case. Traditionally, the Times has used
"corrections" to address factual missteps, and the
"editor's note" to explain lapses of fairness, balance or
perspective. Now, there are assessments. (However, when the Times'
original March 6, 1999, story on Wen Ho Lee is recalled on the Lexis-Nexis
electronic database, the article comes complete with today's editor's
assessment as an appendix, subtitled "Correction.")
Carefully crafted and qualified like a lawyer-vetted brief, the story,
with its front-page teaser and 1,500-word spread, will certainly be
remembered as one of the Times' most dramatic explorations of its own
shortcomings. At times a laundry list of coulda, shoulda, wouldas, the
appraisal is both candid and defensive, admitting both serious,
journalistic blemishes while steadfastly maintaining that the paper's
work is, essentially, accurate. Thecoverage, in which the paper
uncorked a series of breathless stories in the spring of '99 that
painted a dire picture of Chinese espionage at American nuclear
laboratories, pointed the finger at Lee and accused the Clinton
administration of dragging its feet to combat it, was led by Jeff
Gerth. The paper's star investigative reporter, Gerth's earlier
investigations include the now-deflated Whitewater
scandal (which the Times still adamantly defends) and a
1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning series on satellite technology transfers
to China that, in retrospect, now looks badly overhyped.
Tuesday's story (bylined, simply, "From the Editors") found
"careful" and "accurate" work from
"persistent and fair-minded reporters," but concedes, as
critics have for some time, that its Lee coverage should have been
more thorough, more balanced and more skeptical of partisans trying to
use the story -- and the paper -- to score points against the White
House.
"Looking back, we also found some things we wish we had done
differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full
benefit of the doubt," according to the story.
So what went wrong? Basically, the Times editors took a rare fall:
"In those instances where we fell short of our standards in our
coverage of this story, the blame lies principally with those who
directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred to us
only later."
...
Now that the paper's news chiefs have addressed their critics, some
Times watchers are wondering about the editorial page. After all, page
editor Howell Raines, relying on (and often celebrating) the reporting
of the paper's news section, published several finger-pointing columns
about Lee and Chinese espionage last year. Now that editors have
conceded the Times' handling of the story was inadequate, will the
editorial page fess up too?
The actions of the media overall (during
the Clinton years) were perhaps
aptly summed up by Professor (of History) Sean
Wilentz in Salon.com, after Sidney Blumenthal's book was
released:
The historians' verdict was clear:
The impeachment drive against President Clinton lacked constitutional
and political legitimacy. The journalists' opinion was equally clear:
The impeachment was legitimate, and the historians were really a fusty
collection of liberal elitists who had no business sticking their
noses into public affairs.
Now an extraordinary thing has happened. Journalists from across the
political spectrum are finally acknowledging that impeachment was
mostly a partisan crusade on trumped-up charges to bring down a
popular president. "From the viewpoint of history," the
conservative Andrew Sullivan wrote recently in the New York Observer,
"it's going to seem deranged." They have conceded that
numerous allegations noisily leveled against Clinton and repeated
endlessly in the news media of which they are a part have turned out
to be bogus.
The occasion for this sea change in conventional wisdom is the
publication of Sidney Blumenthal's "The Clinton Wars" and
the response to it.
...
Even as journalists admit that Blumenthal has the goods to prove what
a right-wing circus impeachment really was, they dismiss his
revelations as score-settling, and worse -- as "history."
The spectacle of the media, having gotten the story wrong in the first
place, dismissing the book that gets it right is stunning, even to
someone who lived through the actual impeachment.
...
Yet in working up their ad hominem cases against Blumenthal, even his
journalist critics concede that the book's exposure of the partisan
campaign against Clinton that culminated in the impeachment is
accurate and persuasive.
...
Andrew Sullivan in the New York Observer: "The real value of this
book is in its portrait of Mr. Clinton's foes ... .[T]he account Mr.
Blumenthal gives of the haplessness and priggishness of Kenneth Starr
is riveting stuff. The testimony of Sam Dash, Mr. Starr's ethics
advisor, is particularly damning. The insane attempt to actually bring
down a President over perjury in a civil suit has not yet been more
vividly evoked."
Janet Maslin in the New York Times: "Certainly "The Clinton
Wars" can point to baseless, breathless news coverage as a
catalyst to the Kafkaesque."
Lev Grossman in Time: "Blumenthal's abiding theme is that
Clinton's presidency was the victim of a right-wing political cabal
that manipulated the media and the legal system to make mountains out
of dunghills, and he makes a surprisingly convincing case by doggedly
following countless news stories and allegations to their origins in
tainted, planted, unfounded, retracted, distorted, misleading and
plain nonexistent evidence."
Bill Bell in the New York Daily News: "No question, the Clintons
were dogged by some extremely malignant, ignorant and hypocritical
extremists, funded by a few rich conservatives ... .Beyond the
settling of grudges and slights, though, is a bigger, dramatic story
-- of the impeachment itself -- and Blumenthal's riveting account is
sharp, spare and focused. It pulses with the energy of clashing
ideologies and strategies and is propelled by the force of the legal,
political and reputational stakes involved. It sets the standard for
subsequent reports, including the one his Oval Office boss is
writing."
Joseph Lelyveld in the New York Review of Books: "Blumenthal
holds your attention when he pieces together the various components of
what Mrs. Clinton called a "vast right-wing conspiracy,"
from Little Rock enemies and haters to the lawyers of the Federalist
Society who worked their connections to the Office of the Independent
Counsel to shift its focus from real estate to sex ... .Disgraceful
things did happen. On more than one occasion, an Internet gossip
columnist did set the agenda for mainstream news organizations.
Stories without sources did gain instant currency. Some were
fabricated."
Clearly, looking back, the anti-impeachment historians get to say we
told you so. But the more disturbing point is this: Impeachment isn't
just "history." Some of the key "right-wing
fanatics" who peddled "tainted, planted, unfounded,
retracted, distorted, misleading and plain nonexistent evidence"
that led to a "Kafkaesque" political "show trial"
have more power than ever in politics and the media -- and have, it
seems, actually benefited, personally and politically, from their
attacks on the Constitution. The current corrected revised accounts by
journalists leave the misimpression that only a few marginal
right-wing zanies of passing importance were involved in the
illegitimate effort to bring Clinton down. As the now uncontested
facts around impeachment show, that is hardly the case.
On the web, two of the best sources of
information for understanding the Times' and media's role in the
"hunting" of Bill and Hillary Clinton are Salon.com
and the Daily Howler.
This
link provides a list of numerous articles showing the bias and
malpractice of the Times in its coverage of the
Clintons. Using sources, such as those sites (and
others), I have attempted to document some (but not all) of the most
egregious pieces of "journalism" against the Clintons here.
B.
The Times' coverage of Former Vice President Al Gore
and Election 2000
The Times continued its journalistic
malpractice on its political coverage in a big way
during Election 2000. One of the most egregious contributors in its staff
was Katharine Seelye - as a cursory examination of these
links in Bob Somerby's Daily Howler website show. But she was not
alone. Systematic bias against (and a hate for) Al Gore in the media
allowed the kind
of media fraud that became common in the Whitewater years to continue against
Al Gore (even to this day). For instance, the Washington Post,
through the ultra-egregious Ceci Connolly had its own claim to infamy.
Jane Hall wrote a piece
in the Columbia Journalism Review, which is worth reviewing for
starters. Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler noted this
back in Dec 1999:
Jake Tapper, Salon's
post-modern man-about-town, was lead guest on Washington Journal. Please
remind us to tell C-SPAN officials that we now quote Tapper's
word, not our own. Responding to a charge of liberal bias in the
media, Tapper became the third major scribe to describe what went on
in that press room at Hanover:
TAPPER: Well, I can tell you that the
only media bias I have detected in terms of a group media bias was,
at the first debate between Bill Bradley and Al Gore, there was
hissing for Gore in the media room up at Dartmouth College. The
reporters were hissing Gore, and that's the only time I've ever
heard the press room boo or hiss any candidate of any party at any
event.
Remarkable—and the public has a
right to know that the press corps conducts itself so. Earlier, we
have described Time's Eric Pooley saying that the press room
"erupted in jeering" during Gore's responses that night (see
THE
DAILY HOWLER, 11/11/99). We have described the Hotline's
Howard Mortman saying that the scribes "groaned, laughed and
howled" at almost everything Gore said (see THE
DAILY HOWLER, 11/3/99). But hundreds of journalists were in the
room, and no one—repeat, no one; no one at all—has complained
about the press corps' odd conduct.
A small sample
of the Times' egregious coverage and the resultant systematic
deceiving or defrauding of the American public about Al Gore is
captured below - in links (mostly) from the Daily Howler.
Social security plan: Bob
Somerby (Daily Howler) on the Times' Katharine "Kit"
Seelye:
That reader might also be surprised,
however, to read this part of her dissertation:
SEELYE (8): Mr. Gore has been
critical of Mr. Bush for devoting $1.3 trillion of the surplus to an
across-the-board income tax cut over 10 years. But now, with this
new saving plan, Mr. Gore's total of targeted tax cuts comes in at
$500 billion over 10 years, twice what he had proposed before and half
of Mr. Bush's proposal.
The reader might dismiss Seelye's
odd arithmetic as another minor curiosity. For the record, it was the
second time in four days that Seelye had described $500 billion as
being "half of" $1.3 trillion.
In fact, when Seelye writes about a Gore plan, there is no point too
silly, no spin too absurd, to fit into the piece. Why is $500 billion
now "half of" $1.3 trillion? Because Seelye wants to offer
some spin—Gore has been slamming Bush's tax cut, but the
differences aren't all that great. ("Gore will do and say
anything to win.")
...
But Seelye didn't restrict her clowning to bizarre, minor points about
word order. She also engaged in major spinning when she described
Gore's proposal itself. It's hardly surprising—that someone willing
to repeal basic math might cut a few corners on substance as well. At
any rate, here was Seelye's highly tendentious assessment of Gore's
proposal. It came early on in her piece:
SEELYE (7): Mr. Gore's plan does
two things that Mr. Gore had criticized in the plan offered by
Governor Bush, his Republican rival. One, it allows people to invest
taxpayer money in the stock market. Two, it substantially increases
the amount of the surplus that Mr. Gore would devote to tax cuts.
Both the points which Seelye makes
are egregious examples of spin:
Point one: Gore's new plan "allows people to invest
taxpayer money in the stock market," Seelye says. But Gore has
criticized Bush's plan for investing payroll taxes in the stock
market. That strategy, whatever its ultimate merits, does put basic
Social Security benefits at risk. Everything done in the new Gore plan
would be in addition to basic SS. Is Gore's idea a good one? We
don't have a clue. But Gore plainly isn't doing the thing he called
"risky" about the Bush proposal.
Point two: Gore (like McCain) has criticized Bush's tax
cuts for using up the entire surplus (if not more). Gore's new
tax cuts plainly don't do that—especially given the expanded surplus
projection that helped allow Gore to propose them. Obviously, Gore
hasn't criticized Bush just for offering tax cuts per se; Gore
has always proposed tax cuts himself. For the record, by the way, that
$1.3 trillion is the Bush campaign's estimate. The Gore
estimate of Bush's tax cut is higher.
These points are so basic—so utterly simple—that one marvels at
Seelye's presentation. And one is struck by how early on in her
reporting she engages in open disputation.
Drug companies: Robert
Wright (Slate) on the Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg:
There was a time—it
seems like only yesterday—when a presidential candidate could
lambaste the drug industry and expect the New York Times to
run a headline like, "Presidential Candidate Lambastes Drug
Industry." But that was before an arms race in cynicism swept the
world of elite newspapers. These days, a presidential candidate can
expect to get the headline that appeared on the front page of
Saturday's New York Times: "Gore Tries Pitching Himself
As Drug Industry Opponent."
...
It seems to me that if you're going to put out a newspaper—especially
the newspaper of record—you should have rules governing the cynicism
in your headlines. For example: The accompanying story should support
the cynicism.
God knows the article in Saturday's Times, written by Sheryl
Gay Stolberg, does its best. It says up high that Gore has "cast
himself [emphasis added] as a longtime critic" of excessive
drug prices. But the article then has to confront an inconvenient
fact: Gore is a longtime critic of excessive drug prices.
Stolberg herself concedes that Gore's position dates back "to his
days as a young Tennessee congressman." So, how does a reporter
bent on maintaining the obligatory air of cynicism proceed in the face
of this bothersome ideological consistency?
First, make the ideological consistency itself sound vaguely
opportunistic. Stolberg's third paragraph begins, "So Mr. Gore is
dusting off his Congressional record and past speeches to stake out
policies at odds with the manufacturers." Ah, he's a wily one,
that Gore—recycling old convictions! And "staking out"
policy positions that were already grounded in those convictions!
Second, hint at contradictions without documenting any. "A review
of his record, though, and a detailed talk with the vice president
make clear that his views are more nuanced than his languages
suggests." Imagine—nuance. And in a presidential candidate, no
less! But what exactly does "nuance" mean? Does Gore have
views or past utterances that contradict anything he has said
lately? The article gives no example of any. Instead, we get sentences
like this: "And while he argued for greater disclosure of the
industry's pricing practices, the vice president allowed that some
information probably should remain proprietary." Yep, that's
nuance. Book him, Dano.
The indictment also includes this point: "And some of the same
drug makers that Mr. Gore now criticizes have hired his friends and
advisers to represent them as lobbyists." So what was Gore
supposed to do? Have these friends killed? Couldn't a reporter just as
logically look at these facts and laud Gore for resisting the pressure
of his lobbyist friends?
And, finally: "Mr. Gore has also been a strong supporter of the
biotechnology industry, which through collaborations and mergers is
becoming part of the prescription-drug business." Yes, a man
truly qualified to be president would have anticipated these
collaborations and mergers and withheld support for biotech research
in light of its impending association with evil corporations. (To do
anything less is evidence of nuance!) Or, he could have just waited
for the biotech companies to be acquired by the big pharmaceuticals
and then have them killed along with those friends of his that the
pharmaceutical industry also acquired.
You may think I've carefully culled a few weak sentences from a long,
generally strong piece. But these sentences appear almost
consecutively at the piece's outset.
...
The responsible thing to do, it seems to me, is for newspapers to save
their cynicism for cases in which people are manifestly hypocritical,
doing or saying things that are clearly at odds with what they've done
or said in the past. If Gore's record on drug prices contains such
examples, the Times didn't find them.
By the way, if you turn to the jump page, you'll find—right there
under the jump head "Gore Promotes Himself as Industry
Opponent"—that Gore champions a far-reaching Medicare
prescription drug benefit for senior citizens. Oops—I mean
"Gore is positioning himself as a champion of a
far-reaching Medicare prescription drug benefit for senior
citizens." Pardon my uncool naiveté.
Canoe Trip: Bob
Somerby (Daily Howler) on the Times' Melinda Henneberger:
The
Manchester Union Leader, notoriously conservative, went further in its
July 24 coverage. It made clear that PG&E releases water on a
daily basis; it quoted Clyde Kepala of PG&E saying "the
request to lower the dam was routine;" it quoted Kepala saying
that such adjustments have been made for other types of groups; and it
reported that Kassel had called the Washington Times quotes
inaccurate. In short, local papers in New Hampshire and Vermont were
providing information that put the event in greater context, although
no one really tried to explain the basic question: Why is this
"story" a story at all, if the Gore camp didn't make the
request?
What a perfect spot for the New York Times, the nation's great paper
of record! Why, it was just the time for a major paper to begin to
nail down a few facts! A flap now surrounded a leading hopeful, with
some evidence that facts were being invented or spun. Surely the Times
would bring us some clarity-and help straighten out our invaluable
public discourse.
But the New York Times had another plan, involving their ace, Melinda
Henneberger. On this day, you will remember, the brilliant scribe with
the matchless skills had decided to showcase her wit. In a lead story
in the paper's "National Report" pages, accompanied by a
large picture of Gore on the river, Henneberger spent five paragraphs,
and only five, discussing the facts of the story. She devoted the rest
of her piece to silly jokes and worthless discussions of how stiff
Gore had seemed, going on to describe his past posture in cars, when
he would take those long car trips in the 80s.
Henneberger's article failed to clarify facts. In fact, it almost
seemed she was making some up.
Paragraph one: Showing her matchless analytical powers,
Henneberger established that Gore's canoe trip had been planned as a
slick photo op. But then, when she began to describe what happened
next, problems began to surface:
HENNEBERGER:
(paragraph 2) Instead, his Presidential campaign drew complaints
from local environmentalists after the local utility poured
millions of gallons of water into the drought-stricken river on
Thursday to raise the level artificially and keep Mr. Gore from the
embarrassment of running aground.
But who were
these "local environmentalists" (plural) to whom the scribe
was referring? The only such person cited by Sammon, or by the
Manchester Union Leader, was the aforementioned Kassel. But, the day
before Henneberger's piece appeared, Kassel told the AP that he'd been
misquoted, and that he wasn't concerned by the water release. Readers
were told about this in two New Hampshire papers—but not in the
great New York Times. Henneberger never said who the offended
environmentalists were—that plural group to whom she'd
referred—and she never told readers that the original troubled
environmentalist said he wasn't really troubled at all.
Next, Henneberger spent two paragraphs saying the Gore camp denied
requesting the release. In her own voice, she explicitly said the
decision was made by the river commission. Surely, then, she would go
on to explain why her environmentalists were complaining about Gore's
campaign—why the environmentalists were aiming complaints at Gore,
for something his campaign had not done.
That's right. It wouldn't be the great New York Times if the scribe
didn't clarify that. Well sorry, folks. This isn't the Times.
Here was Melinda Henneberger's "analysis:"
HENNEBERGER:
(3) A spokesman for the Vice President, Chris Lehane, said the
campaign had not asked for the water level to be raised. That
decision was made by the Connecticut River Joint Commissions...
(5) Sharon Francis, executive director of the joint commissions,
acknowledged giving the order, "in the interest of safety and
good judgment."
(6) Still, the incident was another misadventure for the campaign—and
did little to make the candidate look smoother, looser, or more
relaxed, which had been the plan...
There was no
explanation of why environmentalists would be angry at Gore, and we
never learned who the environmentalists were. There was no explanation
of why the event was a misadventure for the campaign. Henneberger
proceeded to her endless discussion of how stiff Gore seemed in
various contexts, leaving behind a puzzling story which she made no
attempt to explain or decipher.
"Gen. Westmoreland chat": Bob
Somerby (Daily Howler) on the Times' Melinda Henneberger:
The doctor is IN throughout this
piece, whose headline questions a "compulsion to
exaggerate." Sadly, the piece starts with a lengthy account of
Gore's troubling conduct in telling a thirty-year-old humorous
anecdote—not perfectly accurate, one person thinks—about a trick
played on him in Nashville as a cub reporter. Of this utter, yowling
nonsense, the utterly hopeless New York Times now fashions its bizarre
campaign coverage
Our press corps is determined to be unintelligent. But alas! They also
love to spin. We couldn't help chuckling when The Doctor's ruminations
took her to Fort Rucker in 1970:
HENNEBERGER: [Gore] was
occasionally self-aggrandizing [in his interviews with Henneberger],
as when he recalled that when he was a low-ranking enlisted man at
Fort Rucker, Ala., Gen. William Westmoreland interrupted a formal
departure ceremony to chat with him for an incredible 45 minutes. An
Army buddy who was there recalled they talked for just a few
minutes—five, maybe.
Gore is embellishing again!
Surely it's "compulsive!" But of course, that was
Henneberger's Spin For The Day. In July, her Spin For The Day was
completely different: "Army Private Al Gore was never and could
never have been just one of the guys." So on that occasion, she
compulsively told the Westmoreland tale just a little bit differently:
HENNEBERGER (7/11): No less than
the Army's highest-ranking officer, Gen. William Westmoreland,
singled him out during a visit to Fort Rucker, Ala., where Mr. Gore
was stationed for more than a year. The Army chief of staff stopped
in the middle of a farewell ceremony to pull the young man aside for
a private chat—and kept Mr. Gore's superior officers waiting, and
watching, while he asked one of the lowest-ranking men on the base
for his thoughts on why so many young people opposed the war.
Really! The brass were "kept
waiting and watching" while Westmoreland "pulled Gore aside
for a private chat," we were told back in July. But that was
then, when the scribe had one spin, and this is now, when the spin is
"Gore lies." So now we're told it was "just a few
minutes"—it was over in the bat of an eye! In a targeted
politician, such shifting accounts would be proof of a loathsome
"character problem." But at any rate, listen to how
Henneberger's husband, Bill Turque, told the Westmoreland story in his
recent Gore bio:
TURQUE: At the end of a visit to
Rucker, [Westmoreland] was shaking hands with General Oden when he
spied Gore, covering the departure for the Army Flyer. [Gore's army
friend Bob] Delabar, who was shooting the story for the paper, said
it was as if Westmoreland had spotted an old friend. "He said,
'Oh, Al,'" Delabar recalled. As Oden and his staff cooled his
heels, Westmoreland walked the young private over to the edge of the
tarmac for a conversation that lasted at least ten minutes.
Weird! "Army buddy"
Delabar told Henneberger's husband (in 1998) that the conversation
lasted ten minutes or longer. Is there some other "Army
buddy" who told Henneberger it was "just a few
minutes—five, maybe?" Or is Henneberger—sigh—embellishing
again? We have a call in requesting the dope, and we'll pass along
what we are told.
But what is utterly silly about this? The fact that it was written at
all! This White House race concerns Social Security, taxes,
nation-building, global warming. And Henneberger wants us to waste our
time judging the character of one of the hopefuls based on a
recollection of a pointless conversation that is now thirty years
old!!
"Love Story": Bob
Somerby (Daily Howler) on the Times' Maureen Dowd and Frank
Rich:
Later, it would turn out that Time’s
report was slightly inaccurate; Tumulty told the New York Times
that Gore actually said he had seen a newspaper article saying
that he and his wife had been the models (see tomorrow’s DAILY
HOWLER). And all agreed that such an article had appeared in the
Nashville press. It seems that Tumulty and Pooley had crafted a
slightly simpler narration, omitting Gore’s reference to the
newspaper piece. And indeed, one can hardly blame them if they failed
to foresee the mischief their brief reference might cause.
Because the writers themselves attached little significance to the
VP’s comment. They tossed it off as a minor aside in a long article
about larger matters. They betrayed no sense that they were somehow
being spun, or that Gore had a motive in making his remark--a passing
comment made late at night in the course of a two-hour conversation.
But a thousand miles away, in Washington, D.C., Maureen Dowd had a
good ear for motive. She hadn’t been on the plane, of course,
so she couldn’t know what was actually said; and she had no apparent
way to judge the vice president’s tone of voice or intention.
But in a column published after the Time report, Dowd hailed
“the week’s most stunning revelation,” and after summarizing
what Time had (inaccurately) reported, she offered this
assessment:
DOWD: It’s somewhat suspicious that
Mr. Gore has chosen this moment to drop the news--unknown
even to many close friends and aides. Does he think, going into
2000, that this will give him a romantic glow, or a romantic
afterglow? It reminds me of Jackie Kennedy whispering in Teddy
White’s ear about “Camelot.”
Of course, things can remind us of
other things, but that doesn’t mean they’re connected. And the
fact that Dowd was reminded of Jackie O/K doesn’t mean Gore had a motive
in making his remark. But in the world of gossip-pundits like Dowd, if
something enters your head, you just sit down and type it. By
the next week, Dowd and her Times op-ed colleague Frank Rich just knew
why Gore made his remark.
“It may seem odd that I keep writing about the most treacly book and
movie in modern times,” Dowd wrote, in one of the rare moments in
the life of her column when she verges on self-understanding. In fact,
in a world full of serious issues to explore, her choice of topics
wasn’t odd, it was sad. But four days had passed since
she’d last limned Love Story, and now she was tackling the
topic again. And now she seemed completely sure why the VP had made
his remark:
DOWD: First the vice president, to
warm up his image, planted the notion that he and Tipper were
the models for Oliver Barrett IV and Jennifer Cavilleri.
There’s wasn’t a word to explain
how she knew this, but Frank Rich was completely sure too:
RICH: What’s bizarre, if not all
too revealing, about Al Gore’s now inoperative boast to
reporters on Air Force Two that he and his wife, Tipper, were the
basis for the hero and heroine of “Love Story” is not that he
inflated his past but that he would think that being likened to
the insufferable preppy Harvard hockey player Oliver Barrett IV was something
to brag about in the first place.
Rich hadn’t been on the plane either,
of course, but he knew exactly what Gore had intended. In the course
of his column, Rich described Gore’s remark as an “effort to
overcompensate for his public stiffness;” described it as a
“fib” and as “prevaricating;” and said it showed the
“disingenuousness” that is the vice president’s “real
character problem.”
We often ask, at THE DAILY HOWLER, if college freshmen could possibly
get by with work as bad as that of the press corps; and one can only
hope that no college freshman could get away with arrant nonsense like
this. Neither Rich nor Dowd had been on the plane; neither had heard
the VP’s remark; neither had any apparent way to judge the vice
president’s motives. One would hope a college teaching assistant
would tell a freshman what most college students would already
know--that assessing motive is a delicate task, especially when one
doesn’t know what was said to begin with.
In fact, by the time Dowd and Rich wrote this last pair of columns,
the Times had (incredibly) published a lengthy news story,
exploring the very serious Love Story issue. And it became
clear in that article, by Melinda Henneberger, that what Gore had
actually said was somewhat different from what Time originally
reported. (It was also now clear that what Gore said was true.)
But none of that bothered the Times’ rapt pundits, as they
dreamily typed their impressions of Al. The truth is, they simply
loved that story. It was too good to be untrue.
"Fundraising": Bob
Somerby (Daily Howler) on the Times' Maureen Dowd:
DOWD: Embarrassingly, W. has already
raised $13 million sitting on his porch in Austin, while the Vice
President has endured a cross-country marathon and reported only $8.9
million.
Dowd, of course, has no idea if this is “embarrassing” to Gore.
But what is “embarrassing” is Dowd’s slick way of
spinning the facts on fund-raising. Determined to prove how
embarrassed Gore is, Dowd played fast and loose with simple facts.
Dowd’s figure of $13 million for Bush comes from Don Van Atta’s
May 16 article:
VAN ATTA: On the frontiers of presidential fund-raising, Gov. George
W. Bush of Texas has shattered previous Republican records by raising
$13 million with help from “the Pioneers.”
But that is the amount Bush has raised to date. The Gore
figure, reported again and again in the press, is the amount raised by
March 31:
VAN ATTA: On the Democratic side, both Vice President Gore and former
senator Bill Bradley have piled up impressive numbers. Mr. Gore raised
$8.9 million in the first three months of this year.
It isn’t possible that Dowd doesn’t know this. Indeed, Van
Atta’s article, like many others, specifically mentions that Bush
raised $7.6 million by March 31, the campaign’s first formal
reporting date.
Dowd badly wanted, in her gloomy Goth way, to say things were
“embarrassing” for Gore. But she couldn’t do that by saying that
Gore outraised Bush at the first reporting. So she reported
Bush’s total for the middle of May--and compared it to Gore’s for
the end of March! She then told her readers how “embarrassing” it
was that Bush had raised so much more money.
But of course, she didn’t quite tell readers that. Like the
politicians whose slickness she claims to despise, Dowd frequently
treats herself to deniability. Dowd wrote that Bush had “raised”
$13 million, and that Gore had “reported” 8.9. And why did she
make that choice of words? Because that way, kids, everything Dowd stated
can be defended as literally accurate.
That’s right, readers. It’s exactly the kind of slippery
construction Dowd hates in that naughty Bill Clinton. You have
to parse every word this gal says!
More on Dowd here.
"Clintonesque, and other
garbage": Bob
Somerby (Daily Howler) on Gail Collins:
Gore
asked Martin, “How old is your child?” (she was five), and asked
if Martin had good insurance (she did). For this, he was savaged all
over the press corps. Here was the repulsive Gail Collins, writing in
the great New York Times:
COLLINS: Al Gore has a personality
without a thermostat, and when he tries to look animated he
practically crashes into the wallboard. On Wednesday he hijacked the
auditorium early on, begging for a chance to do a pre-debate
Q.-and-A. (“This person has a question! Do we have time for his
question?”) He tossed in a little Spanish and a long joke, and
made endless attempts to create Clintonesque mind-melds with the
audience. (“How old is your child, Corey? Are you unionized,
Earl?”)
For asking a woman about her sick
child, Gore was called—what else?—Clintonesque. A few weeks
later, the slow-walking gang on Kurtz’s show had no idea why this
was happening.
UPDATE 6/3/04: Digby has a must-read
take on Howell Raines latest piece in The Guardian. A definitive
illustration of Raines - the trash-talking, corrupt, "elite"
gasbag who more than anything else is responsible
for destroying the journalistic credibility of the Times.
2. IRAQ: The Times' coverage of
the Iraq invasion/war prior to May 2004
Last week, the New York Times
issued an apology for its faulty coverage of the events and
"evidence" leading up to the Iraq war. Before we review this
"apology", it is instructive to see what some media critics
were saying about the Times' coverage previously and how people at the
Times (and its reporters) had originally responded to that.
Michael
Massing, The New York Review of Books (Feb 04):
Now They
Tell Us
In
recent months, US news organizations have rushed to expose the Bush
administration's pre-war failings on Iraq. "Iraq's Arsenal Was
Only on Paper," declared a recent headline in The Washington
Post. "Pressure Rises for Probe of Prewar-Intelligence,"
said The Wall Street Journal. "So, What Went Wrong?"
asked Time. In The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh described
how the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, the Office of
Special Plans, to sift for data to support the administration's claims
about Iraq. And on "Truth, War and Consequences," a Frontline
documentary that aired last October, a procession of intelligence
analysts testified to the administration's use of what one of them
called "faith-based intelligence."
Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you
all before the war? Why didn't we learn more about these deceptions
and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing
its case for regime change—when, in short, it might have made a
difference? Some maintain that the many analysts who've spoken out
since the end of the war were mute before it. But that's not true.
Beginning in the summer of 2002, the "intelligence
community" was rent by bitter disputes over how Bush officials
were using the data on Iraq. Many journalists knew about this, yet few
chose to write about it.
Before the war, for instance, there was a loud debate among
intelligence analysts over the information provided to the Pentagon by
Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi and defectors linked to him. Yet
little of this seeped into the press. Not until September 29, 2003,
for instance, did The New York Times get around to informing
readers about the controversy over Chalabi and the defectors
associated with him. In a front-page article headlined "Agency
Belittles Information Given by Iraqi Defectors," Douglas Jehl
reported that a study by the Defense Intelligence Agency had found
that most of the information provided by defectors connected to Ahmed
Chalabi "was of little or no value." Several defectors
introduced to US intelligence by the Iraqi National Congress, Jehl
wrote, "invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with
direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected
unconventional weapons program."
Why, I
wondered, had it taken the Times so long to report this? Around
the time that Jehl's article appeared, I ran into a senior editor at
the Times and asked him about it. Well, he said, some reporters
at the paper had relied heavily on Chalabi as a source and so were not
going to write too critically about him.
The editor did not name names, but he did not have to. The Times's
Judith Miller has been the subject of harsh criticism. Slate, The
Nation, Editor & Publisher, the American Journalism
Review, and the Columbia Journalism Review have all run
articles accusing her of being too eager to accept official claims
before the war and too eager to report the discovery of banned weapons
after it.[1] Especially controversial has been Miller's
alleged reliance on Chalabi and the defectors who were in touch with
him. Last May, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post wrote of an
e-mail exchange between Miller and John Burns, then the Times
bureau chief in Baghdad, in which Burns rebuked Miller for writing an
article about Chalabi without informing him. Miller replied that she
had been covering Chalabi for about ten years and had "done most
of the stories about him for our paper." Chalabi, she added,
"has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our
paper."
When asked about this, Miller said that the significance of her ties
to Chalabi had been exaggerated. While she had met some defectors
through him, she said, only one had resulted in a front-page story on
WMD prior to the war. Her assertion that Chalabi had provided most of
the Times's front-page exclusives on WMD was, she said, part of
"an angry e-mail exchange with a colleague." In the heat of
such exchanges, Miller said, "You say things that aren't true. If
you look at the record, you'll see they aren't true."
This seems a peculiar admission. Yet on the broader issue of her ties
to Chalabi, the record bears Miller out. Before the war, Miller wrote
or co-wrote several front-page articles about Iraq's WMD based on
information from defectors; only one of them came via Chalabi. An
examination of those stories, though, shows that they were open to
serious question. The real problem was relying uncritically on
defectors of any stripe, whether supplied by Chalabi or not.
This points to a larger problem. In the period before the war, US
journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the
administration. Those with dissenting views—and there were more than
a few—were shut out. Reflecting this, the coverage was highly
deferential to the White House. This was especially apparent on the
issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction— the heart of the
President's case for war. Despite abundant evidence of the
administration's brazen misuse of intelligence in this matter, the
press repeatedly let officials get away with it. As journalists rush
to chronicle the administration's failings on Iraq, they should pay
some attention to their own.
...
By late summer of
2002, then, Miller had developed a circle of sources who claimed to
have firsthand knowledge of Saddam's continued push for prohibited
weapons. And as she and Gordon made the rounds of administration
officials, they picked up a dramatic bit of information about Iraq's
nuclear program. During the previous fourteen months, they were told,
Iraq had tried to import thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.
The tubes had been intercepted, and specialists sent to examine them
had concluded from their diameter, thickness, and other technical
properties that they had only one possible use—as casings for rotors
in centrifuges to enrich uranium, a key step in producing an atomic
bomb.
This was dramatic news. If true, it would represent a rare piece of
concrete evidence for Saddam's nuclear aspirations. And, on Sunday,
September 8, 2002, the Times (then under the editorship of
Howell Raines) led with the story, written by Miller and Gordon.
"US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts," the
headline said. The lead was emphatic:
More than a decade after Saddam
Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has
stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a
worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush
administration officials said today.
Gordon and Miller went on to cite
the officials' claims about the aluminum tubes and their intended use
in centrifuges to enrich uranium.
The article contained several caveats, noting, for instance, that Iraq
"is not on the verge of fielding a nuclear weapon." Overall,
though, the language was stark:
Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on
pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described
in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's
chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United
States to the brink of war.
Administration
"hard-liners," Gordon and Miller added, worried that
"the first sign of a 'smoking gun'... may be a mushroom
cloud." The piece concluded with a section on Iraq's chemical and
biological weapons, relying heavily on the information supplied by
Ahmed al-Shemri. "All of Iraq is one large storage
facility," he was quoted as saying.
Gordon and Miller argue that the information about the aluminum tubes
was not a leak. "The administration wasn't really ready to make
its case publicly at the time," Gordon told me. "Somebody
mentioned to me this tubes thing. It took a lot to check it out."
Perhaps so, but administration officials were clearly delighted with
the story. On that morning's talk shows, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell,
Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice all referred to the information
in the Times story. "It's now public," Cheney said on
Meet the Press, that Saddam Hussein "has been seeking to
acquire" the "kind of tubes" needed to build a
centrifuge to produce highly enriched uranium, "which is what you
have to have in order to build a bomb." On CNN's Late Edition,
Rice said the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons
programs, centrifuge programs." She added: "We don't want
the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"—a phrase lifted
directly from the Times.
In the days that followed, the story of the tubes received wide
publicity. And, on September 12, 2002, President Bush himself, in a
speech to the UN General Assembly, said that "Iraq has made
several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich
uranium for a nuclear weapon"— evidence, he added, of its
"continued appetite" for such a weapon. In the following
months, the tubes would become a key prop in the administration's case
for war, and the Times played a critical part in legitimizing
it.
...
From the start, however, the Times story raised doubts among
many nuclear experts. One was David Albright. A physicist and former
weapons inspector who directed the Institute for Science and
International Security (the same group for which the defector Khidhir
Hamza had worked), Albright favored a tough position on Iraq,
believing Saddam to have WMD and advocating strict measures to contain
him. In the summer of 2001, however, after the aluminum tubes were
intercepted, he had been asked by an official to find out some
information about them, and in doing so he had learned of the doubts
many experts had about their suitability for use in centrifuges. Some
specialists with ties to the US Department of Energy and the
International Atomic Energy Agency had concluded that the tubes were
more likely destined for use in conventional artillery rockets, as
Iraq itself had claimed. Officials at the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research would later concur.
Reading the September 8 article, Albright felt it was important for
the Times to take note of these dissenting views. In the past,
he had worked frequently with Judith Miller; in fact, it was Albright
who had arranged for her to interview Khidhir Hamza. Although he was
unavailable when Miller tried to contact him for the September 8
story, he had several long conversations with her after it was
published. He then described the doubts many centrifuge experts had
about the administration's claims. And, on September 13, 2002, a
follow-up story appeared. It was not, however, what Albright had
expected. Six paragraphs into an article that summarized the White
House's case against Iraq, Miller and Gordon noted that senior
officials acknowledged "that there have been debates among
intelligence experts about Iraq's intentions in trying to buy such
tubes." But, they quickly noted, those officials insisted that
"the dominant view" in the administration was that the tubes
were intended for use in centrifuges to enrich uranium. While some
experts in the State and Energy Departments "had questioned
whether Iraq might not be seeking the tubes for other purposes,"
the article stated,
other, more senior, officials
insisted last night that this was a minority view among intelligence
experts and that the CIA had wide support, particularly among the
government's top technical experts and nuclear scientists.
"This is a footnote, not a split," a senior administration
official said.
Yet Albright, having talked with a
large number of those experts and scientists, knew that many did not
support the CIA assessment. "Understanding the purpose of these
tubes was very difficult," he told me.
But hearing there's a debate in the
government was knowable by a journalist. That's what I asked Judy to
do—to alert people that there's a debate, that there are competent
people who disagreed with what the CIA was saying. I thought for
sure she'd quote me or some people in the government who didn't
agree. It just wasn't there.
The Times, he added,
made a decision to ice out the
critics and insult them on top of it. People were bitter about that
article—it says that the best scientists are with [the
administration].
Miller rejects this. The article,
she says, clearly stated that there was a debate about the tubes. As
written, however, the piece gives far more attention and credence to
officials who dismissed the dissenters, and the debate, as
inconsequential—a "footnote."
Frustrated, Albright began preparing his own report about the tubes.
Seeking an outlet, he approached Joby Warrick of The Washington
Post.
...
The performance of the Times was especially deficient. While
occasionally running articles that questioned administration claims,
it more often deferred to them. (The Times's editorial page was
consistently much more skeptical.) Compared to other major papers, the
Times placed more credence in defectors, expressed less
confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters. The
September 8 story on the aluminum tubes was especially significant.
Not only did it put the Times's imprimatur on one of the
administration's chief claims, but it also established a position at
the paper that apparently discouraged further investigation into this
and related topics.
The reporters working on the story strongly disagree. That the tubes
were intended for centrifuges "was the dominant view of the US
intelligence community," Michael Gordon told me. "It looks
like it's the wrong view. But the story captured what was and still is
the majority view of the intelligence community—whether right or
wrong." Not only the director of central intelligence but also
the secretary of state decided to support it, Gordon said, adding,
Most of the intelligence agencies in
the US government thought that Iraq had something. Both Clinton and
Bush officials thought this. So did Richard Butler, who had been
head of UNSCOM and who wrote a book about Iraq called "The
Greatest Threat." So it was a widely shared assumption in and
out of government. I don't recall a whole lot of people challenging
that.
Yet there were many people
challenging the administration's assertions. It's revealing that
Gordon encountered so few of them. On the aluminum tubes, David
Albright, as noted above, made a special effort to alert Judith Miller
to the dissent surrounding them, to no avail.
Asked about this, Miller said that as an investigative reporter in the
intelligence area, "my job isn't to assess the government's
information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job
is to tell readers of The New York Times what the
government thought about Iraq's arsenal." Many journalists would
disagree with this; instead, they would consider offering an
independent evaluation of official claims one of their chief
responsibilities.
A rebuttal (mostly from the Times) to Massing and
Massing's response is documented
here.
Jack Shafer wrote about Judith
Miller and the Times in Slate
in May 2003:
The lead
editorial in Monday's New York Times applauds the news
reported in the Times' own pages that the CIA is
reassessing the prewar intelligence about Iraqi's unconventional
weapons programs collected by the CIA, the National Intelligence
Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other agencies. The
editorial reads:
The failure so far to find any
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the prime justification for an
immediate invasion, or definitive links between Saddam Hussein and
Al Qaeda has raised serious questions about the quality of American
intelligence and even dark [sic] hints that the data may have
been manipulated to support a pre-emptive war. [Emphasis
added.]
If the government must re-examine
whether data may have been "manipulated" to support the war,
surely the New York Times should conduct a similar postwar
inventory of its primary WMD reporter, Judith Miller. In the months
running up to the war, Miller painted as grave a picture of Iraq's WMD
potential as any U.S. intelligence agency, a take that often directly
mirrored the Bush administration's view.
...
"[Chalabi] has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD
to our paper," Miller e-mailed Times Baghdad bureau
chief John Burns. Miller added that the MET Alpha—a military outfit
searching for WMD after the invasion—"is using Chalabi's intell
and document network for its own WMD work."
The failure of "Chalabi's intell" to uncover any WMD has
embarrassed both the United States and Miller. As noted previously in
this column, she oversold the successes of the post-invasion WMD
search. On April 21,
she reported in the Times that an Iraqi scientist had led MET
Alpha to a site where Iraqis had buried chemical precursors for
chemical and biological weapons. "Officials" told Miller
this was "the most important discovery to date in the hunt for
illegal weapons."
On April 22, Miller told The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer the
military regarded the scientist as much more than "a smoking
gun" in the WMD investigation—he was "a silver
bullet." For all of Miller's fist-pumping on behalf of MET Alpha,
none of her spectacular findings have been confirmed by other
newspapers. (The Washington Post's Barton Gellman did an
especially good job of poking holes in Miller's scoop.) The Times has
never returned to the MET Alpha "burial grounds" to defend
her heavily hyped "silver bullet" account. (See this "Press
Box" for a chronology of Miller's reporting from Iraq.)
Did Miller get taken by sources with an agenda, or did she promote
their suspect data for her own ideological reasons? Her Iraq coverage
has always relied heavily on Iraqi defectors.
To Miller's credit, she often qualifies her defector stories by noting
that the CIA doesn't buy what they're selling. In piece after piece,
she notes that the agency suspects they invent or embellish their
tales to increase chances of winning asylum. But her caveats are
usually followed by a passage about how the Pentagon embraces the very
defectors the CIA spurns.
...
"The country needs to know if the spy organizations were right or
wrong," concludes the Times editorial, a fair and
equitable stand. But by the same logic, the country needs to know if
Miller and the Times too gullibly advanced the WMD findings
of their sources—and if so, why.
Shafer, wrote a follow-up piece in Slate
in Feb 2004, asking the Times (again) to come clean - and this time
taking Miller to task even more for dissembling repeatedly in trying to
defend the indefensible:
Massing levels special scorn at
Miller, whose WMD journalism published before the Iraq war, as he
footnotes, elicited critical reviews in the Nation,
Editor
& Publisher Online, AJR,
and CJR,
and by me in Slate.
Responding to Massing's criticism that she channeled the
administration's spotty WMD case, Miller blames U.S. intelligence for
the discrepancies between what she reported about Iraqi WMD before the
war and the latest findings of the weapons hunters. "The fact
that the United States so far hasn't found WMD in Iraq is deeply
disturbing," she tells Massing. "It raises real questions
about how good our intelligence was. To beat up on the messenger is to
miss the point."
How's that missing the point? If a messenger persists in delivering
inflated and deceptive information—information that benefits her
government sources—doesn't she deserve a good public flogging?
...
Miller, who is quoted
extensively in Massing's piece, faced him again on Feb. 3 on WBUR-FM's
The Connection, where she disputed both the conclusions
of his New York Review piece and his competence. In one
hilarious segment about one-quarter of the way through the show,
Miller claims Massing fails to "tell the reader how investigative
journalism works," presumably because he doesn't understand it.
According to Miller, this is how the investigative process works:
Basically you get a fact, you try
and put it in context, you check that alleged fact with as many
different sources as you can, and then if that fact turns out to be
controversial or—within the government—or not believed by some
as you go along you collect more information and you write again.
And it's just too easy especially in an area where everything is
classified and where people can go to jail for talking to you, it's
just too easy to stand back and say why didn't you report this,
that, and everything else. … [Click here for
Miller Clip 1 from WBUR-FM's The Connection, distributed by
NPR.]
The piece that he wrote and his criticisms unfortunately
reflects a lack of understanding of about one, how hard information
is to get in the national security area and two, how newspapers
really go about doing this. Believe me, I tried to vet information
in every way that I could before it was published. We never
published—not once—an administration allegation without checking
it against alleged experts, independent experts, it's just very very
hard when this information is this tightly compartmentalized and
classified. [Click here
for Miller Clip 2.]
Ordinarily, I don't unfurl
credentials to defend somebody's reputation, but let me make this
exception. As this 2001
biographical note indicates, Massing is the former executive
editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and has written for
the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, the Atlantic
Monthly, the Washington Post, the Nation, the New
Republic, the American Prospect, and Rolling Stone,
among others. He helped found the Committee
To Protect Journalists, scored a MacArthur fellowship in 1992, and
in 1998 authored The Fix, a widely praised book about drug
policy. It's absurd to imagine Massing doesn't understand the
mechanics of investigative journalism or doesn't appreciate how
difficult national security information can be to obtain.
Indeed, it's Miller who seems clueless about how investigative
reporting works. Earlier in the program, she describes her role as the
conveyor of official news rather than a skeptical reporter:
My job was not to collect
information and analyze it independently as an intelligence agency;
my job was to tell readers of the New York Times as best as
I could figure out, what people inside the governments who had very
high security clearances, who were not supposed to talk to me, were
saying to one another about what they thought Iraq had and did not
have in the area of weapons of mass destruction. [Click here
for Miller Clip 3.]
Where did Miller learn the art of
journalism? The job of a good reporter—investigative or otherwise—is
more like that of an intelligence analyst than a stenographer. A good
reporter is supposed to dig for the truth, no matter what "people
inside the governments" with "very high security
clearances" might say. The very point of Massing's objections
about the prewar WMD coverage is that Knight Ridder folks got closer
to the truth with blue collar sources than did Miller with all of her
"inside" sources.
...
Rather than come clean on The
Connection about her stories and simply admit that she was taken,
Miller speculates that her stories generate so much "anger"
because her critics are all antiwar or they're still furious about the
2000 election, and they've made her the scapegoat. Seriously! She
states:
I think the reason … is that
people are genuinely angry and upset and deeply polarized about the
war. And I think they're genuinely upset and angry about the
election of an administration that some people feel, you know an
election itself that was, quote, stolen, and that all of this anger
has kind of come to the fore in the debate over WMD in Iraq.
Give me a break! I'm one voluble
Miller critic who can state unequivocally 1) that the 2000 election wasn't
stolen and 2) the Iraq invasion was justified. To pretend that her
critics have merely misplaced their anger is psychobabble of the most
inane sort.
...
Miller's dissembling continued this week when she told Women's
Wear Daily on Feb. 10 that Massing's piece "misquoted
and misrepresented" her. If Massing really misquoted and
misrepresented her, don't you think she should have brought the
subject up during The Connection's 45-minute broadcast?
Massing responded to Miller's allegation in a letter
to Romenesko, writing, "Per our agreement, I checked
every quote with her prior to publication. She approved each and every
one."
I recommend that readers read Shafer's
entire piece to see what a piece of work Miller is. At the same time,
the fact that the problem was not just Miller was easily apparent from
the reluctance of the Times' top guns to take any real action to address
the valid criticisms of Miller's and the Times' work.
For example, the Daily Howler also brought
to our attention the more straightforward excuse offered for the
Times' stenography by the New York Times' Elisabeth
"Is God on America's Side" Bumiller:
Kafka
could never have dreamed this crew up! In recent weeks, the New York
Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller has published a string of bizarre “White
House letters,” praising the president’s fine bedtime habits and
rhapsodizing about his warm, “comfy” bed. Snoopy should have
gotten a by-line. The scribe also made a fool of herself at a
Democratic presidential debate.
Now, the Spotless Mind takes us behind the scenes at that famous
pre-Iraq White House press conference. The conference was held on
March 6, 2003; assembled reporters lobbed softballs at Bush, bringing
themselves widespread ridicule (see THE
DAILY HOWLER, 3/11/03). Finally, Bumiller
explains the corps’ behavior. Kafka couldn’t have
dreamed up a White House correspondent who was willing to say this in
public:
BUMILLER: I
think we were very deferential because…it’s live, it’s very
intense, it’s frightening to stand up there. Think about it,
you’re standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of
the United States a question when the country’s about to go to
war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one
wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very
serious time.
It’s frightening to stand up
there, Bumiller says. It’s
frightening to ask the president a question! At the time, Bush
hadn’t met with the press in four months; dozens of questions were
begging for answers. But according to Bumiller, it was too scary.
Why did the “press” lob softballs that day? No one wanted to
get in an argument, the spotless Times journalist says.
It’s amazing that Bumiller felt this way. It’s much more amazing
that she’d say this in public. You sometimes think we’re being
hyperbolic when we say that our “press corps” can’t be from this
planet. But remember: The words we quote were recently spoken by the
New York Times White House correspondent! We’ve told you for years:
You don’t have a press corps! First by her “letters,”
then by this statement, Bumiller makes our point clear.
Nick Confessore at TAPPED highlighted how the New York
Times' steep drop in journalistic standards is traceable back to its publisher
Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., who defended Judith "WMD"
Miller:
NOT OFF THE HOOK YET.
Speaking
of Judith Miller, Editor & Publisher reports here
on remarks New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.
gave to the National College Media Convention. Among other things, he
defended Judith Miller's now widely-discredited
reporting on the search for WMDs in Iraq thusly:
At one
point, a college reporter asked Sulzberger a pointed question about
one of his newspaper's star writers, Judith Miller, who has been
widely criticized for misleading coverage of alleged weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq last year. The publisher defended Miller, saying
he had known her "for decades," adding that she "has
fabulous sources."
Then he added: "Were her sources wrong? Absolutely. Her sources
were wrong. And you know something? The administration was wrong.
And when you're covering it from the inside like that you're going
to get things wrong sometimes. So I don't blame Judy Miller for the
lack of finding weapons of mass destruction." This produced a
few laughs from audience members. "I blame the administration
for believing its own story line," he continued, "to such
a point that they weren't prepared to question the authenticity of
what they were told."
Not to be glib, but isn't it Miller's
job to question the authenticity of what she was being told? To avoid
being a conveyor belt for misinformation that even at the time was
widely called into question? To not allow herself to be duped by her
sources simply because she was close to them?
As Jack Shafer pointed
out, the problem was not that Miller was getting at information
that nobody else could get, and that information sadly turned out to
be wrong. It's that she never challenged the veracity of claims by her
high-level, anonymous, ideologically motivated sources by collecting
information from the lower-level analysts who turned out to be
correct, as did (among others) the fine reporters in Knight-Ridder's
Washington bureau.
That her sources got things wrong is no excuse. Sources try to spin
reporters all the time -- it's what they do. Miller's responsibility
was to avoid getting herself spun, and it's a responsibility she
failed to uphold.
With the publisher of the nation's "newspaper of
record" (or whatever it is) believing it was/is not the job of his
newspaper's staff to try and establish the veracity of the
"facts" but merely report what is told to them in stenographic
form, it becomes an indisputable fact that the Times' standards for
journalistic integrity were probably just barely above that of
supermarket tabloids.
3. THE FUTURE: The Times'
position today and what it portends for the future
The New
York Times' apology for its skewed pro-war coverage is reproduced
below:
Over
the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight
on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. We have examined
the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the
issue of Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to
international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official
gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on
ourselves.
In doing so — reviewing hundreds of articles written during the
prelude to war and into the early stages of the occupation — we
found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of. In most
cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our
knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from
intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy
information. And where those articles included incomplete information
or pointed in a wrong direction, they were later overtaken by more and
stronger information. That is how news coverage normally unfolds.
But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as
rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was
controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently
qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we
had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence
emerged — or failed to emerge.
The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but
many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on
information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles
bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility
has come under increasing public debate in recent w |
