Title: The Worst of Times
Publication: Salon
Review Author: Andrew O’Hehir
Date: December 28, 2004

"Hard News: The Scandals at the New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media"
By Seth Mnookin
Random House
352 pages
Nonfiction

"The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports U.S. Foreign Policy"
By Howard Friel and Richard Falk
Verso
352 pages
Nonfiction

___

Dec. 28, 2004 - One of the very few points of
agreement between "Hard News" and "The Record of the Paper" is that
[Judith] Miller's anonymously sourced front-page "exposés" in late 2002
and early 2003 about the alleged Iraqi WMD -- which now appear to have
been false in virtually every detail -- got into print because of the
Times' overpowering institutional predilection to hew to the perceived
political center. Mnookin says that half a dozen Times sources have
told him that [NY Times Editor] Howell Raines seized on Miller's WMD
stories as a way to establish that his liberal views weren't driving
his editorship... [Ed: see Op/Ed by Howell Raines]

If there's a connection between Mnookin's measured
and judicious "Hard News" and "The Record of the Paper," Howard Friel
and Richard Falk's blistering critique of what they describe as the
Times' chronic misreporting of U.S. foreign policy, it's that both
books remind us that the Times is fundamentally a business, and its
reputation for impartial and careful newsgathering is fundamentally a
marketplace commodity. It's what the Times is selling us. Like all
other commodities, it is shaped by the conditions under which it is
sold: It goes up and down in value, it is repackaged and redesigned to
seem more appealing, it is understood by different consumers (that is,
readers) in different ways.

Of course, it's true that the press in general
bears an important public trust in American democracy, at least in
theory, and the Times' dominant position brings with it a
disproportionate responsibility. But setting the civics lesson aside,
the true mission of the New York Times is not to serve the public but
to serve its owners and shareholders. It's a corporation striving for
market share in a capitalist economy. It's a brand -- the most
prestigious brand name in journalism -- and the decisions of its
editors and managers, whether good or bad, are seen as affecting the
long-term viability of that brand...

For Howard Friel, an unaffiliated media watchdog,
and Richard Falk, a retired Princeton law professor, the Miller stories
are part of a far more insidious and sinister pattern. They argue that
the Times, over the course of five decades, has consistently ignored
questions of international law (which the U.S. has violated on numerous
occasions) and treated government pronouncements with an almost
childlike credulity. Their tone is sometimes intemperate -- it may not
be incorrect to observe that many people around the world view Israeli
premier Ariel Sharon as a terrorist, but it isn't especially helpful --
and their long, densely argued book is unlikely to reach beyond its
Noam Chomsky-Howard Zinn core readership. But their case is difficult
to refute.

Essentially, Friel and Falk contend that as
American political discourse has crept to the right, the Times has
crept along with it, maintaining a relative position that can plausibly
be perceived as to the left of Republican orthodoxy but slightly to the
right of the Democratic Party mainstream. During the run-up to the Iraq
invasion in early 2003, for example, the paper tortured itself and its
readers with a series of yes-but-no, no-but-yes editorials, finally
opposing the war at precisely the moment it had become inevitable. Then
there was the infamous story by Michael Ignatieff in the Times
Magazine, suggesting that some coercive torture-lite procedures might
be necessary to combat terrorism -- which was sent to the presses just
before the first photographs of atrocities at Abu Ghraib reached our
eyes.

[Ed: Reported April 29, 2004 by CBS Sixty Minutes and Sy Hersh in The New Yorker, May 5, 2004 www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/... www.icp.org/exhibitions/abu_ghraib/]

Before the war began, the Times' Op-Ed page was
overcrowded with the ruminations of the so-called liberal hawks:
Democrats or independents who for various reasons favored military
action but sought to remain distant from George W. Bush. Perhaps never
in intellectual history have the soul-searchings of such a tiny
quadrant of opinion been aired so extensively and so flatulently.
(Salon, let it be said, was not innocent of this offense.)

At no point, amazingly, did anyone point out in the
pages of the Times that the proposed invasion was illegal under the
United Nations Charter and, by extension, the U.S. Constitution. (Under
Article VI, section 2, of the Constitution, international treaties
ratified by the United States, such as the U.N. Charter, are "the
supreme law of the land.")

It seems clear that the Times, like the rest of
American society, isn't interested in international law because there's
no precedent for our taking it seriously. Philosophically, Friel and
Falk make a potent argument about the corruption of our empire -- we're
violating the explicit dictates of our own Constitution -- but on a
practical level it's hard to imagine what can be done about it.

During the Cold War, realpolitik dictated that the
U.S. government acted in its own interests, ignoring international law;
the Soviets sure weren't going to abide by it. In the post-Cold War
period of American global dominance, there's been no global power
structure even remotely capable of making the United States play by the
so-called rules. The United Nations didn't even pretend it could do
anything except stand on the sidelines and wail while Bush and Tony
Blair started their illegal (and undeclared) war.

Even without embracing some utopian vision of
international law, it might be possible for America's leading newspaper
to view the policies and actions of its own government with a touch
more skepticism (as it did, to its eternal honor, when publishing the
Pentagon Papers in 1971). Even if Friel and Falk sometimes state their
case too broadly, I think they're right that the Times' "misguided
go-along patriotism," especially in the wake of September 2001, has led
to an "imbalance of knowledge" between the United States and the world.
Most newspaper readers in other countries were aware that the proposed
invasion of Iraq was illegal and that the WMD (and al-Qaida) charges
leveled against Saddam Hussein were speculative at best. As of Nov. 2,
at least, Americans still hadn't gotten the memo.

In fairness, the Times' coverage of the Iraq
conflict has turned sharply critical since it became clear how badly
Miller and her editors got played on the WMD story. And herein lies the
difference between the Blair and Miller cases. Jayson Blair was
essentially a lone sociopath whose supervision was so lax that he broke
every accepted code of journalism and got away with it, at least for a
while. Judith Miller played by the rules, at least as they were
understood at the Times in that moment. She presumably believed that
the supposed Iraqi defectors supplied to her by Ahmed Chalabi -- head
of the Iraqi National Congress and one-time neocon fave-rave -- were
genuine, and in their eagerness for front-page scoops, Raines and other
editors accepted the stories on blind faith.

When the Times ultimately disavowed Miller's WMD
reporting -- which did not happen until May 26, 2004, more than a year
after the last of her controversial pieces -- it did so in restrained,
rather technical language, in an unsigned editorial on page A10 that
was reportedly written by Bill Keller, who had himself been a pro-war
"liberal hawk." No reporters or editors were named, although the pieces
discussed were mostly Miller's. Perhaps it was dignified not to cast
aspersions directly on the departed Raines, but the piece,
unsurprisingly, also did not discuss the notion that the Times was
overly eager to balance its liberal reputation by uncritically
embracing whatever the government said was true.

[Ed: Considering the impact of the NY Times
reporting by Miller on the run up and boosting of the US case for war,
let’s ask a ‘what if’ question... What if Seymour Hersh, instead of
Judith Miller, was lead investigative reporter for the Times as he was
in the 1970s? Would Sy Hersh have accepted and reported proved
existence of WMDs? The Times nationally syndicated Miller’s
investigative ‘proof’, providing a powerful drumbeat to war. But let’s
“walk back the cat” as the term is used in the intelligence business.
To what extent was Miller an outlet for a ‘dark propaganda’ psy-op in a
Wolfwowitz/Perle/neocon orchestrated march to war? When Richard Perle
accused Sy Hersh of being a “terrorist” how much more was there to this
story - was Hersh getting close to the truth in his New Yorker
investigative reports on a secret war office in the Pentagon ...

www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact
www.worldpaper.com/archive/2003/march_19/march1.html
www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=24533]

Keller's editorial made clear that the Times had
been hoodwinked by Chalabi (who had recently been removed from the U.S.
payroll and even accused of spying for Iran). It did not say that the
whole enterprise resulting in Miller's breathless exclusives might have
been a dark propaganda operation, planned by Paul Wolfowitz at the
Pentagon and funded by American taxpayers. As Friel and Falk detail,
Chalabi and the INC had received funding from the Defense Department,
under the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, to supply Iraqi defectors to
U.S. intelligence agencies and then to Western reporters.

A subsequent assessment by the Defense Intelligence
Agency, as has been widely reported, found the information supplied by
Chalabi's defectors to be "of little or no use." This introduces the
hair-raising possibility that the Pentagon spread Chalabi's WMD
disinformation to journalists while knowing it wasn't true -- or simply
not caring whether it was or not. "It seems that Chalabi may have been
paid by the U.S. government," Friel and Falk write, "to give what was
known to be false or suspect information to the Times about Iraqi WMD
at critical moments that supported the work of the Pentagon's Office of
Special Plans," the Wolfowitz unit that coordinated strategy for the
Iraq invasion.

Looking too closely into the Miller affair, then,
would raise the question of how America's leading newspaper, which
prides itself on its impartiality and its "non-crusading" character,
was so readily hypnotized by a mendacious administration that it
splashed that government's most spectacular untruths across the front
page, over and over again. This question goes well beyond Judith Miller
or Howell Raines or Bill Keller, all of whom have to look in the mirror
every day and wonder to what extent they are responsible for a
misguided war that has cost thousands of human lives and now feels like
a bottomless disaster. Jayson Blair was just a weird kid who told some
fibs.

It's easy for a book reviewer to sit here and
second-guess the Times' reporting on Iraq long after the fact. The
individual who bears ultimate responsibility for the Iraq war is George
W. Bush, and he might well have gone ahead with his long-desired
invasion if the Times had never swallowed any of Chalabi and
Wolfowitz's bunkum (and, for that matter, if 9/11 had never happened).
Of course, you or I didn't know that when Colin Powell gave his fateful
audiovisual presentation to the United Nations in February 2003, he was
pretty much pulling it out of his butt. Almost every reporter has been
hoodwinked by a source and, if he or she is honest, can imagine being
swept up in scoop-fever to the point of making Miller's mistakes,
egregious as they were.

[Ed: Who is Judith Miller – “who did more than any
other single individual, except perhaps George W. Bush, to spread the
notion that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass
destruction and, by extension, that war with Iraq was both necessary
and inevitable.” http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/...]

No, the fundamental question about the future of
the New York Times, in the Keller era and beyond, is whether it can
recover a sense of true impartiality and independence, or whether its
editors and managers have become so snuggly with power, so seduced by
the corroded political discourse of our time, that they define
"impartiality" as a point of perpetual, semi-neutral waffledom, halfway
across the infinitesimal distance between Joe Lieberman and John McCain.

Friel and Falk quote from the legendary opinion of
late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case,
when the court ruled that the Times could publish the leaked documents
in defiance of the Nixon White House: "In the First Amendment, the
Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to
fulfill its essential role in our democracy," Black wrote. "Only a free
and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.
And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to
prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and
sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign
shot and shell."

Seen in this light, the Jayson Blair case was an
embarrassing sideshow, nothing more. With the bogus WMD stories
reported by Miller and approved by various editors, the Times -- which,
for all its flaws, remains the last, best hope for American journalism
-- disgraced itself and betrayed its essential role in what remains of
our democracy. We have to hope that Bill Keller, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
and about 1,200 other people who work on 43rd Street understand that.

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