"Bad Journalism Meets Government Lies
by Nicholas Von Hoffman
The nominations are in, and in the category of worst correspondent working for a major newspaper, the Anti-Pulitzer goes to Judith Miller of The New York Times. From The New York Review of Books to New York magazine, Ms. Miller has gotten ripped for her role as the War Witch who sold America on the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
Her own newspaper has dumped on her and, in the process, dumped on some of its other reporters and their supervisors. In a strange and contorted résumé of The Times' less-than-distinguished coverage of the war and the events leading up thereto, the paper's editors wrote, "We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been." In the course of their mea culpa, the authors directed the readers to a Web site displaying a list of what they deemed the worst samples of their journalistic debacle. Ms. Miller's byline is on a number of them.
How could the most prestigious newspaper in the United States -- the paper read by much of the ruling class, if you will forgive the use of that odious but not undescriptive term, the paper from which most of the rest of big-time commercial mass media takes its cue -- how could it, overbrimming with Harvard graduates yet also fashionably diverse in its staff, how could it have been "taken in"?
Was it just Ms. Miller who caused her newspaper to suffer what may be a longer embarrassment than the Jayson Blair affair? Not very likely. A lot of other people were in on this one, as Daniel Okrent, The Times' public editor, indicated in a signed piece appearing four days after the big mea culpa. "Some of The Times's coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines .... The Times's flawed journalism continued in the weeks after the war began, when writers might have broken free from the cloaked government sources who had insinuated themselves and their agendas into the prewar coverage. I use 'journalism' rather than 'reporting' because reporters do not put stories into the newspaper. Editors make assignments, accept articles for publication, pass them through various editing hands, place them on a schedule, determine where they will appear .... The failure was not individual, but institutional."
Mr. Okrent is right if you buy his premise, which is that the paper did not adhere to its own standards. It had, he wrote, "too great a hunger for scoops," it had a "front-page syndrome," meaning an overweening desire for smackeroo stories, did "hit-and-run journalism," defined as covering something once and then leaving the readers hanging without reporting subsequent developments, and finally, he said, the paper indulged in "coddling sources" by printing weak stories the sources wanted in the paper.
If you accept Mr. Okrent's implicit definition of what a newspaper, particularly The Times, is, then you cannot argue with his judgments, and he is partially right. A newspaper is supposed to be this incorruptible organization of fierce social, economic and political independent neutrality which practices a disinterested professionalism. That is what the news industry holds itself out to be, it's how it advertises itself and, at least as importantly, it's what its reporters and editors take it to be. But it isn't. At least, that's not all it is...."
You can read the rest at the Anderson Valley Advertiser:
http://www.theava.com/04/0623-nytimes.html