Abstract
The carnegie endowment's 2001 national proliferation Conference concluded with a journalists' panel featuring stalwarts like Marvin Kalb, once of CBS-TV, now at Harvard, and Judith Miller of the New York Times. They told a crowd consisting mainly of experts on nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons who had spent two days in meetings, what a superb job they, the journalists, were doing covering national security. They heaped praise on one another (and indirectly, of course, on themselves) for their ability to gather and deliver the information they obtained from government officials. After all, they said smugly, who else knew what they knew?
Looking around, I could identify at least a hundred audience members who knew more–most of whom were far less likely than the panel members to mindlessly echo flavor-of-the-political-month “truths.” The crowd should be tossing rotten tomatoes, I thought, but at least the question period would be interesting.
When the time came, though, the questions were disappointingly polite. On display in Washington that fine June day was the fact that reporters danced to the tune their government sources played (shunning, in the process, the pursuit of any facts that might annoy the authorities). All the wonks and wonky wannabes knew, in turn, to say the right words to get asked to the dance as well. It seemed harmless enough at the time, although four months later, on September 11, such niceties should have come to an end.
Instead it got worse. That same day Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and a horde of neo-cons saw a chance to use the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center as a pretext for war on Saddam Hussein. “Go massive…. Sweep it all up. Things related and not,” wrote Rumsfeld (as book reviewer Walt Uhler points out).
The media had 18 months to ask hard questions about the Iraq-related sucker bait dangled in front of it–much of it “evidence” of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that failed the laugh test. But the more ridiculous the emperor's new claims (imaginary clothes being harder to palm off these days), the more the media strove to make whole-hearted swallowing of them a test of patriotism.
Television coverage was unforgivable, both before and during the war. The White House correspondents appeared complicit in the president's highly scripted pre-war press conference. Print was bad, too, shilling for the government and asking few questions. The ultimate print moment may have belonged to Times reporter Judith Miller, whose pre-war source was the felonious Ahmad Chalabi. On April 21 Miller announced that an unnamed Iraqi scientist had three days earlier identified an unnamed site where, he said, Iraq had destroyed unnamed chemical and biological weapons before the war. She described this as the “most important discovery to date.” (See “A Calendar of Errors,” page 12, for more on the weapon search.) In a more professional atmosphere, no editor would have accepted this helium-filled story from a junior reporter, nor received it from a star. And no one would have put it on page one unless maybe it was bylined by God.
With the administration turning its steely eyes toward an offending Iran, I hope that more members of the press will just do their jobs.