Firefighting at the New York Times

Dasu Krishnamoorty 

It is theater of schmaltz and remorse again at the Times Square, inspired by the overpowering urge to disseminate the truth about how The New York Times reporters gathered information about the suspected presence of weapons of mass destruction  (WMDs) in Iraq. The Gray Lady suddenly woke on 26 May, as she did umpteen times in the past, to fault lines in her editorial structures and acknowledged in a From The Editors note that stories the newspaper commissioned and published on WMDs before the Iraq war have dodged editorial oversight as did Jayson Blair¿s and several other reports. But all the sophistry The Times editorial team could marshal in another exercise in self-flagellation has failed to hide the hideous truth that its WMD stories provided the excuse for the Bush administration to go to war with Iraq. (See The Hoot article Bush Media Axis dated 03 June 03). The world is unconcerned about what happens inside a newspaper office but if its outcome has consequences for war and peace, it has a right to know how it has happened and who is responsible for it.  

During those crucial days before the war with Iraq, The Times reporting came very close to war mongering. Expiating for its journalistic sins, The Times came out with an explanation it relegated demurely to page 10 of its main section, in contrast to the front-page parade of WMD stories. It is unbelievable that The Times could not hear its own cries of war originating in accounts its reporters sent, sourced mainly to Iraqi exiles, particularly Ahmad Chalabi, a great favorite with the Bush administration not long ago. Times editors Bill Keller and Jim Abramson in a memo to the staff said the From The Editors note was an attempt to ?acknowledge that we, like many of our competitors and many officials in Washington were misled on a number of stories by Iraqi informants dealing in misinformation.? This happened despite warnings from media critics like Michael Massing and magazines like Slate and Editor and Publisher. More than anybody, readers, noticing the hysteria in The Times reports, wrote letters expressing concern about the consequences of such journalistic frenzy.  

Faulty Sourcing 

The more The Times tries to wriggle out of its embarrassment the more it gets ensnared. Its note (From The Editors) says, ?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.? All this arty prose fails to conceal the newspaper¿s dependence on sources that had sketchy information. The rider at the time hardly exempts the paper from its duty to collect information that is accurate at any time. Judith Miller whose media eminence must have elicited unquestioning compliance from The Times desk did most of the WMD stories. The note explains, ?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.? What if such more and stronger information does not turn up later? Being wise after the event helps future reporting but does not have retrospective effect. 

What The Times reports 350 other newspapers reproduce because they all subscribe to The New York Times News Service and suffer the same loss of face, as does The Times. They spread the same disinformation as their source does. It may be too far-fetched to link NYT reports to the war and the ruin it brought to Iraq and its people. Yet, The Times reporting has provided the raison d`etre for the Bush administration to squash anti-war sentiments. Tom Rosensteil, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, also thinks that The New York Times reporting had a ?huge? influence on the nation¿s decision to go to war. Jack Shafer of Slate magazine, a known critic of  the Judith Miller kind of journalism, says that NYT reporting was instrumental in setting the agenda for America¿s foray into Iraq.

The latest episode raises issues of accountability and points to how the media blatantly flout the norms of sourcing and the disastrous results of such indifference to basic principles of journalism. Daniel Okrent, who became The Times new public editor after the Jayson Blair episode, says in his weekly column (30 May, Weapons of Mass Destruction or Mass Distraction?) in Week In Review, ?There is nothing more toxic to responsible journalism than an anonymous source. It¿s a license granted to liars. The victims of the lie are the paper¿s readers. In The Times¿ WMD coverage, readers encountered some rather breathless stories built on ¿unsubstantiated revelations¿ that, in many instances, were the anonymity-soaked assertion of people with vested interests.?  In reality, what is happening in The Times is institutional failure and not individual because it is not just the reporters who are to blame but an entire hierarchy of editors whose responsibility is to save readers from disinformation. 

Liz Halloran, writing for The Hartford Courant says, ?the editors said that they reviewed hundreds of articles written before and during the early stages of the occupation, and found that the paper failed in a number of cases to weigh accounts given by Iraqi defectors ¿against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussain ousted¿.? In his column, Okrent complained that ¿readers were never told that Chalabi¿s niece was hired in January 2003 to work in The Times Kuwait bureau. She remained there until May of that year.¿ 

Not the first time 

The Times note revives memories of its earlier reporting gaffes figuring in a series of articles The Hoot published showing how star reporters (Jayson) of The Times sent home fiction masquerading as news; how its Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty hid the truth about starvation deaths of millions of people in the Ukraine from The Times and its readers, afraid that it would block US administration¿s recognition of Stalin¿s dictatorship; and how Lynette Holloway¿s stories about TVT Records bristled with inaccuracies that had to be explained away in another lengthy article by Diana Henriques. In all these cases, NYT published elaborate exegesis throwing hardly any light on how these half-truths escaped editorial vigil. 

However, NYT ombudsman Okrent makes public what From The Editors note shied away from acknowledging. He says, ¿in some instances reporters, who raised substantial questions about certain stories were not heeded. Worse, some with substantial knowledge of the subject at hand seem not to have been given the chance to express reservations. It is axiomatic in newsrooms that any given reporter¿s story, tacked up on a dartboard, can be pierced by challenges from any number of colleagues. But a commitment to scrutiny is a cardinal virtue. When a particular story is consciously shielded from such challenges, it suggests that it contains something that plausibly should be challenged.¿ This shows that an axis is at work at the desk that protects stories of privileged reporters from a second look. 

The letters to editor on the controversy show how more wisdom resides outside the newsrooms than inside them. Roger Lippman of Seattle writes, ¿the instinct to jump into print should have been constrained by the responsibility to check the facts. The Times found itself used, consciously or not, as a Bush propaganda organ to drum up support for the Iraq war.¿ ¿Is it also wishful thinking to believe that if the press and Congress had done their jobs - challenge the bullies in the White House instead of succumbing to their spin - history might have played out differently,¿ asks Ann Travers from Montclair, NJ. Deborah Freedman of Hamden, Conn. expresses the same view.  She writes, ¿Perhaps if you and other news organizations had shone a brighter light on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney before the last presidential election, we would have no Iraq war to report on today at all.¿ 

Several readers complained that From The Editors note was buried in limbo and that The Times failed to name any of its reporters guilty of misleading a nation. Okrent, its public editor, however, makes up for it. He writes, ?The apparent flimsiness of ¿Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve Of War¿ (21 April 03) was no less noticeable than its prominent front-page display; the ensuing sequence of articles on the same subject, when Miller was embedded with a military unit searching for W.M.D., constituted an ongoing minuet of startling assertion followed by understated contradiction.?  

The Times war journalism can be attributed to the excessive dedication of newspapers to ideologies based on traffic concepts like left, right and center and the anxiety to play the kingmaker. NYT has critics on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Its critics include watchdog bodies like FAIR, intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Norman Solomon and academic and professional journals. Its detractors believe that NYT coverage of the Vietnam War, the liberation movements in Latin America etc. are models of what reporting should not be. Contrary to the popular belief, not all Americans are ready to die if The Times promises to publish their obituary.