I’ve always thought that the media’s obsession with Jayson Blair was mostly navel-gazing, and that from a reader’s perspective, Iraq was far worse. The new Times public editor agrees:
My sense is that they have recovered better from the Blair scandal than from the paper’s flawed reporting about the existence of weapons of mass destruction that led up to the Iraq war. I hear about this, disparagingly, from readers far more often. Because much of that reporting, especially from the disgraced reporter Judith Miller, took place at the same time and under the same leadership, I asked Mr. Raines about that as well.
“I regret any error that ever got into the paper, but from where I sat, there was a total congruence — everything was coalescing around one message,” he said, noting that The Times was far from alone in its reporting. “I was suspicious, and perhaps I should have been more aggressive in pursuing that suspicion.”
Real journalism can never be about “one message”. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, who was mostly interested in maintaing control over his own country, at least after Gulf War I. Al Qaeda operatives — who had nothing do with Saddam Hussein — carried out a terrorist attack in the United States. There was never any evidence that these two facts are related in any way, but no one can question that 9/11 set the stage for the second Iraq War.
There should never have been any “one message” here.
Lurking Canadian
No evidence? What about that one time that one dude had breakfast in that one coffee shop with that other dude?
Besides, ALUMINUM TUBES, SHEEPLE!
Keith
Wars make for great ratings, and these people have abstracted out the thought that they bring an entire country (and fresh bodies) to war in pursuit of those ratings.
Cervantes
It’s well-documented that the Times has been corrupt for decades; even the damned crossword puzzle was turned into a venue for product placement. Anyone who still hasn’t given up on the whole sickening enterprise is a far more hopeful and trusting soul than I could ever dream of being (he said wistfully).
Yutsano
@Lurking Canadian: Yellowcake from Nigeria!! Also, too.
(I think it needs moar BENGHAZI!!)
Tokyokie
For me, it all coalesced around one message. That our country was being run by craven, bloodthirsty, stupid incompetents.
Chris
@Lurking Canadian:
Possibly the single most cynical lie they told was when they tried to use Zarqawi as proof of the “missing link” between al-Qaeda and Saddam – because hey, he’s got ties to al-Qaeda, and he’s in Iraq. QED, right?
Except, you know where Zarqawi was based? Kurdistan – northern Iraq – the part of the country that the American no-fly zone and support for the Kurds had turned into a Western-friendly autonomous region, beyond Saddam’s control. Using Bush’s own standards of evidence, that would’ve been “evidence” of a tie between Zarqawi and US. Not him.
cathyx
They sold a lot of newspapers because of the drum up to the war, and then the actual war. That’s all they cared about.
dr. bloor
No Shit, Sherlock. That’s what happens when one flawed “source” with an agenda has his hands in the pants of everybody inside the beltway.
sb
I’d have more respect for Raines if he would just say, “Here’s how it all got so fucked up and what we’re doing to avoid it happening again.” Instead, he’s just saying there was groupthink back in the day and perhaps maybe he shoulda been more suspicious. He doesn’t get it and he’s not alone.
Warren Terra
The problem is that, in terms of simple rules of journalistic practice that can be mindlessly applied, most of what Judith Miller wrote was “true” – she really did have well-placed sources feeding her this whole pile of malarkey. By contrast, Jayson Blair’s tales were wholly invented or were plagiarised.
Now, Miller’s stories turned out to be a terribly inaccurate description of the actual world we live in. But they were generated according to the standards of practice that applied. This should be an indictment of how we do journalism in this country, but the mindless regurgitation of the pablum you’re spoon-fed by elite sources is a lot easier.
cathyx
By the way, what is Judith Miller doing now?
Keith
@cathyx: It’s the whole news industry. When there’s no war or shooting to cover, we’re punished with 24 hour analysis of Jodi Arias or some other random local crime blown national. With a shooting, they have to spend at least a week covering every minutiae to the point where it feels like the Arias trial (I once saw CNN covering an ATM that the shooters may have used as well as a door to a building Jahar took classes in). A war is a double-dip-cream-dream for these jokers, since every day is a new development they can cover.
PeakVT
@Keith: I think ratings (or circulation) is definitely the main cause of our media’s pro-war bias. On an individual level, there’s also the chance for individual reporters to make a name for themselves, or at least feel like they’re part of something important. I think editorial teams tend to be pro-war, or at least not anti-war, because they’re generally not of the class that would have family members involved. OTOH, the only outlets that have an anti-war bias are small-circulation left-wing magazines.
cathyx
@Keith: You can see it at the local level as well, except it’s usually around a weather related subject. They love a storm, any storm.
News broadcasts used to be a loss leader for networks. Now it has to be a money maker, no matter the subject.
James Gary
Jayson Blair? Iraq? It’s 2013, who gives a f*ck? It’s a good month for me when I don’t have to make a premature withdrawal from my IRA to cover my mortgage. To quote Mr. C. Pierce: “People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money.”
rb
@sb: Precisely. Very reminiscent of Saint Timmy Russert saying “to this day, I wish my phone had rung.”
Fuck you, Timmy. Cheney laundered his bogus intelligence through your “tough” show, and you just sat their with a huge grin on your huge pumpkin face.
I’m not particularly skittish about speaking ill of the dead, but even if I were, that particular quote above would more than justify it.
PeakVT
@cathyx: “Contributing” to Newsmax was the last thing I heard.
rb
@Warren Terra: [M]ost of what Judith Miller wrote was “true” … [her stories] were generated according to the standards of practice that applied.
I know what you’re saying, but the above is actually quite false, and it is extremely important that this be known and remembered. Miller’s cheerleading and scale-thumbing and medal-pinning and telling the military who to hit and who to arrest was well outside the bounds of ethical journalistic practice, and any reporter who wasn’t a DC courtier would have said so at the time. Her stories were neither truthful nor did they meet any rigorous (or even not so rigorous) standards of conduct.
In her way, Miller was creating just as many false realities as Blair, and she got way more people killed than he ever did.
goblue72
@PeakVT: She’s a complete right-wing hack. After getting canned from the Times for fabricating most of her stories, she went to Fox News, then the right-wing Manhattan Institute, and now Newsmax.
devtob
When the media “coalesce around one message” provided by government, they are acting more like Pravda or Der Sturmer than they will ever admit.
But the Iraq War is just the latest example of the American media stenographing government war propaganda.
Chris
@Warren Terra:
Well, it should be an indictment, yes. If journalists are going to be nothing but stenographers for highly placed people with agendas and no investigative work whatsoever, not much point in having a media in the first place.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
Coalescing around one message huh? That’s adorable if you consider yourself an extension of the White House PR department or an election campaign team. But in the case of the Iraq War, anybody that was paying attention could see it was horseshit without the resources and time a Times reporter could get dedicated to the question. There’s what, a dozen or so real reporters at the Times/WaPo? People like Dana Priest. They get awards and applause and get ignored afterwards. Those few reporters are the only ones that understand their jobs and have any business in a news room.
I’ve sometimes wondered what would happen if a large contingent of the press just stopped caring about access and started going around their celebrity sources looking for stuff in government reports and then confronting the PR people with it afterwards. If “no comment” is all you get, fine, that’s easily printed. Being nice to people for access should probably matter to beat reporters for local sports teams and that’s about it. The republic would be better off if national politicians and DC lobbyists were treated like organized crime figures by the press. Just sayin’.
joel hanes
Shorter Raines: “I see it as the job of a newpaper editor to impose a unified narrative on the news, and not to ensure the newspaper gets the facts straight.”
Even shorter: “I am unfit to lead the defacto newpaper of record.”
Tonal Crow
A better confession to moronic groupthink even the Onion could hardly write.
Mandalay
The article Doug cites links to an interesting “editor’s note” written by the NYT editors in 2004, which does a post-mortem of their Iraq coverage.
It readily blames Iraqis, and contains perhaps-this, perhaps-that pablum. But nowhere does it mention the biggest issue was that our government lied to them.
Until they state that the media, and the nation, were repeatedly and massively lied to by the Bush Administration, everything else is just window dressing.
scav
“Coalescing around one message” = Who cares if it’s the truth so long as we all repeat the same thing together? Yep, there’s our “It’s not our job to fact-check” New York Times.
Maude
@Comrade Nimrod Humperdink:
Or the press should treat them like poor people.
cathyx
If the corporations that own the papers have an agenda that they want to pursue and stockholders and board members they want to enrich, then they are going to do what is necessary to meet that goal. Do the stockholders and board members have financial stakes in areas that will enrich them if we go to war? Surprise, surprise, yes. And they conveniently control the message to do just that. The newspapers don’t need to make money, just using them as an outlet to get the government to do what it needs to make money is payment enough.
pseudonymous in nc
Margaret Sullivan had a slightly rocky start as public editor, but ever since, she’s been pretty damn good. She seems better suited for the job than previous incumbents, because she knows who she’s meant to be representing — the readership as a collective entity, not those powerful individuals who already have a hotline to the editor’s desk, and definitely not the paper’s staff.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@efgoldman: Oh I know how important socially and economically it is to be a personage in the DC circuit. It hasn’t been dubbed the Village or Hollywood for ugly people (or Versailles part Duh for that matter) for nothin’. It’s just another example of the incentives in a system being almost completely disconnected from anything in the professed aims of the discipline. Aside from dumping a bunch of swarthy Communists in DC with notepads and locking up the press corps I don’t really have a solution.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@Maude: That might actually be worse. Poor people don’t exist to the press. I’d much rather that my government officials didn’t disappear.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@cathyx: Heh indeed, Michelle Rhee says hi to Kaplan with hugs and kisses.
Mandalay
@goblue72:
She wrote an article for WSJ titled (snicker) “How to Stop Terrorists Before They Kill” last week.
The woman is shameless.
Lizzy L
The absolute nicest thing you could say about it is that the NYT got rolled. Conned. Played like rubes at the carny.
But I think you all have it right — the Times and every damn other major media outlet in the country were having too much fucking fun beating the drums for war, shouting “USA USA” and getting invited to the Kule Kidz’s parties. Some of them at least had the courage to go to Iraq, embed, and discover that hey, war isn’t all that fun if you’re being bombed and the people you care about are getting killed. They got lied to by the government, sure. We all did. But damn it, it’s their job to figure that out and tell the rest of us. That’s why the Founders protected the press in the Constitution, so that they could do that job. Which, hey hey, the fuckers failed at.
Pissed off? Me? No, why would you think that?
Kay
They’re still doing it. The NYTimes pushed the “skills gap” hard, where the theory is we have a defective workforce and that’s why wages are stagnant.
Anyone could see who that theme benefitted. Industries that hoped to push the cost of training their workers off on individuals and government.
They had bought and paid for Freidman pushing THAT weekly.
They would have more credibility if JUST ONCE they would climb on some bullshit bandwagon that helped advance a theme that actually benefits some broad segment of the population, but I never see THAT kind of “mistake”
Why do all their failures run one way?
NotMax
@Yutsano
Niger.
Different country entirely.
KG
@efgoldman: it would make the paper much easier to read. Get to the sports page must faster…
NotMax
Like dingleberries around a hemorrhoid.
I’ve heard of a nose for news, but a butt?
Also too, cheerleading is not reporting. “All the agitprop that fits, we print” may as well have been the revised slogan.
Maude
@Comrade Nimrod Humperdink:
Get one of the poor to buy lobster with food stamps. Guaranteed to bring press coverage.
maya
Chris
@Lizzy L:
It’s a hell of a thing when war becomes as anticipated and exciting an event (for our political and press corps, but for the entire country as well) as a baseball season. Which is exactly what happened in Iraq – most of the wars in recent memory, in fact.
(Wingnuts, please, spare me the John Stuart Mill “war sucks but pacifist fagz suck more” litany. The “now watch this drive” draft dodging coward sure as hell wasn’t given to weighing the various evils of the human condition, and neither were you).
Yutsano
@NotMax: I think my brain tried to reflexively block out the whole mishegas. And I thought it didn’t look right.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay:
That’s the question, isn’t it?
Maude
@Yutsano:
You got the first few letters right. That’s better that I usually do.
Edit, spell fail.
Southern Beale
That was the fucking point, you asshat! To PLAY you! Fucking dumbass. Did he think the warmongers and neocons wouldn’t try to spin the media — including the Great New York Times? As if every single fucking them anybody does in the world anymore is to play the media?
Cripes. The stupidity.
Yes. Perhaps.
/eyeroll
Yutsano
@Omnes Omnibus: Mammon. All is for the worship of Mammon. Anything else is unserious and not even worth mentioning so it might as well not exist. And they make certain it doesn’t in their minds.
Mike in NC
The 27%ers just know that Saddam was the evil mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.
scav
And if the NYT considers its public editors as one of the vaunted safeguards of integrity? There is not enough vacuum present in the known universe to produce the hollowness of my laughter. There’s that dark matter creeping in again.
Yutsano
@Mike in NC:
And the MSM was gonna make that true, regardless of the reality of the situation. Cuz war is cool, and shit.
NotMax
@efgoldman
Likely that a majority of people remain unaware that even the mendacious, woebegone Bush administration was forced to disavow those infamous 16 words in the SOTU.
Rewarding ignorance rankles.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
They just dropped RTW in OH based partly on the objections of “job creators” who need skilled trades. They can ramp up quickly because unions have training programs.
Now, I don’t know if that’s valid or not, broadly, but just once I’d like to see a (flawed!) Harvard study promoted by media that doesn’t benefit the top 10%.
Where are those mistakes, “no one could have predicted” fuck-ups, etc.
Southern Beale
By the way, if you didn’t think the owners of the West, Texas fertilizer plant could get any douchier, well, read this.
JWL
Raines equated the Times suburb reporting of the 9/11 attacks with the big lies the Times was later spoon fed about Iraq by Bush/Cheney.
He never lacked suspicion, because he never suspected jack-shit. He was on a roll, at the top of his game, and digging every minute of it. He was a fool, and remains dishonest about those days.
That’s my take, anyway.
Southern Beale
@efgoldman:
Saw it and I replied to your reply.
:-)
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
For a profession that supposedly lives and dies by “follow the money” they NEVER follow the money. The money is waving at them, “hey, over here!” and they won’t glance over there!
Scott Walker says “there are no welders in Milwaukee” and they respond with, “hmmm. Obviously a SKILLS GAP.”
Really? It’s not that Scott Walker wants to pay welders 9 dollars an hour after they pay for their own training? Because I think there are probably welders in Milwaukee. He’ll have to PAY them above minimum wage, of course.
Debbie(aussie)
@Southern Beale:
I have about $3 mil liability insurance on my house, for f*ck sake!
Yutsano
@efgoldman: Her husband, her neighbours, and her puppeh. Otherwise I have no clue.
Kyle
Shorter Howell Raines:
All the other kids were doing it.
James E. Powell
Here’s what really matters: did anything bad happen to Raines as a result of the Times publishing bullshit propaganda to support the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq?
Since nothing bad happened to him, he must not have done anything that was really wrong.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Why do all their failures run one way?
They don’t consider them failures?
If they are getting paid to do what they do and the publisher is not questioning their work, then maybe they are not on our side. Their work is intended to do what their
ownersemployers want, to separate us from the owners money. And make no mistake they consider it to be their money. We may get to use it for a short time but they feel that they own it. And we are resented for that time we are using it.AA+ Bonds
Not to me, it wasn’t. This pretty much proves the Times was delinquent.
Bart
At least the NYT got rid of Judith Miller. But her accomplice Michael R. Gordon is still in place.
ppcli
“[F]rom where I sat, there was a total congruence — everything was coalescing around one message”
And, though it was obviously spurious to anyone outside the charmed circle, it just happened to be the message that the people in power wanted to spread.
Treasure this, folks, because rarely are you going to see Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent summed up and acknowledged so succinctly by one of the manufacturers.
Bill Murray
@Kay: They follow the money, but to get paid, not to determine the source of iniquty
Mart
I listened to the UN Inspector’s updates on NPR several times just before the war. Don’t feel like Googling but the radiation expert talked of ease of tracing isotopes, there were none found. They were almost certain there was no nuclear program in place before the war. The Chief – Blix? said they had unprecedented access, and although you can not prove there wasn’t something somewhere; they had found nothing. They were fairly satisfied there was nothing to find.
So yes, there was no independent expert on the ground for the NYT’s to source with another version of the Powell story. News was so full of shit then, when I would bring up the UN Inspector’s reports everyone laughed as they “knew” Saddam had thrown them out. Believe Bush himself repeated that lie after they had returned. Guess you could say it was honest ’cause they were thrown out before they came back…
Also too, does the Bush library have access to the 5,000 page report that the Iraq government sent us saying they had nothing? That report was instantly laughed off by all media with no review. Would love for an honest broker expert to see what was in there.