NY Times' Gullibility on WMD
Jim Lobe compares the recent performance of New York Times and some of its reporters with that of the Times in their coverage of the Bolshevik revolution.
If Walter Lippman, perhaps the most influential U.S. press critic and foreign-policy columnist of the 20th century, were alive today, chances are he would shake his head knowingly and mutter something like, "La plus ca change, la plus c'est la meme chose." ("The more things change, the more they remain the same.")After all, it was in 1920 that he and a colleague, Charles Merz, wrote in their analysis of New York Times coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution between 1917 and 1920 that the newspaper's reporting on Russia during that period was "nothing short of a disaster."
. . .
Two articles in the last two weeks have been particularly striking. One, titled "Now They Tell Us," by veteran journalist Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books, concluded that the Times, especially its star WMD reporter Judith Miller, relied far too heavily on hawks within the Bush administration, INC officials – notably the group's president Ahmed Chalabi – and "defectors" as its sources.
. . .
A second story, by William Jackson, Jr., a former senior arms control adviser in the Carter administration, which appeared in 'Editor & Publisher', the normally sedate trade paper of the newspaper industry, echoed Massing's thesis, but also expressed outrage over the Times' failure to take any responsibility for passing along information. [Emphasis added]
Noting the similarity between then and now, Lobe continues with the Lippman-Merz article . . .
"In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see ... the chief censor and chief propagandist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors."
"They wanted to win the war; they wanted to ward off Bolshevism. These subjective obstacles to the free pursuit of facts account for the tame submission of enterprising men to the objective censorship and propaganda under which they did their work," wrote Lippman and Merz.
That subjectivity led directly to the second problem, the one seized on by Jackson and Massing in their analyses: "boundless credulity and an untiring readiness to be gulled" by sources who shared journalists' hope and fear.
Will there be a note of acknowledgment? I think that as likely as someone's coming forward to collect Doonesbury's $10,000 reward.
