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By Paul Geary
May 17, 2005
The New Editor
The regularity of journalistic misfeasance is such that patterns have emerged. We see two
recurring parallel phenomena now: Incorrect stories that are designed to embarrass the
administration, and hubris from the offenders. One is a product of the other.
Generally journalists are predisposed toward antagonism of the administrations they cover, be
they Democrat or Republican. Many journalists at one time dreamed of being the next Bob
Woodward or Carl Bernstein, and you don't get Pulitzers for sucking up to politicians. That
journalists today are antagonistic toward the Bush administration is not in itself indicative of
media bias.
But what is fairly unprecedented about the current run of errata from the likes of Newsweek,
the New York Times, and CBS, is the willingness to run stories based on flimsy evidence
unencumbered by actual fact-checking or source-vetting; that is, Journalism 101. This is
inexcusable from a professional standpoint, but the added rub is that in three of the most
prominent cases, the stories seemed to have had little more than specific intent to embarrass
the administration.
Contrast this with those heroes of modern journalism, Woodward and Bernstein. As anyone
who's ever seen or read "All the President's Men" knows, the two were frustrated by the
knowledge that something wrong was certainly going on in the White House, but Washington
Post editor Ben Bradlee had the temerity to expect actual proof to corroborate what would be
a nation-wrenching story.
Sloppy reporting hurt the reputations of CBS and the New York Times, in part because those
stories -- the Bush Guard duty fiasco and the missing weapons story, respectively -- came
close enough to an election to raise eyebrows. But the Newsweek story -- like Watergate --
has much larger implications.
Watergate broke well after the 1972 election; Richard Nixon was ineligible to run again and
the immediate political fallout was that the Democrats' margins in Congress simply increased
in 1974. There was no large-scale balance of power shift in the mix, and few have even tried
to make a credible case that the Washington Post was out to discredit Richard Nixon for any
reason other than that he was actually dishonest.
The fallout of the Newsweek story is that people are dead, and that yet another credible
falsehood about the US has spread like wildfire across the Islamic world. The damage is not
just a few votes swayed based on bad information not retracted in time. US credibility has
been damaged unfairly.
What is perhaps more appalling than the inaccuracies at CBS, the New York Times, and now
Newsweek is the utter hubris that accompanied the denials and mea culpas.
CBS's hubris was its 12 days of denials before Dan Rather apologized for the story, the
sources of which had long since been shown to be demonstrably fraudulent. At the end of
October, many of the same producers were still working on the Bush Guard story,
apparently convinced that some evidence existed somewhere to prove that the president's
service was ... nonexistent? fabricated? tainted?
The New York Times reported that 380 tons of munitions were missing in Iraq. Or maybe it
was three tons. And maybe the munitions were gone before US troops got there. Or maybe
they were never there! By election day, who really knew? The Times story broke on October
25, and on October 26 the Times did know one thing: "Iraq Explosives Become Issue in
Campaign" (a headline from page one). What was the Times' reason for the timing of the
story? The Internet was circulating it already, said the Times. Internet buzz drove a Times
expose, coincidentally two week before the election? Evidently that buzz came to a
screeching halt after the election: The Times stopped pursuing the story.
Newsweek's hubris is arguably the worst. Newsweek's original apology had the language of
equivocation ("regret that we got any part of our story wrong") -- which later became a
complete retraction -- in a case where because of the story, people were unequivocally dead
and US foreign policy was unequivocally damaged. "Even the worst enemy of the United
States could not harm the image of the United States in the Muslim world as effectively as
they've done if this is correct," said Khursheed Kasuri, Pakistan's foreign minister. That the
editors at Newsweek did not know that (they were around for Abu Gharaib, right?) and
therefore make damn sure it was correct is questionable to say the least.
The mistakes and the hubris are related. Many in the media desperately want to prove to the
world what is axiomatic to the cognoscenti: The Bush administration is corrupt, inept, or
both. They feel Woodward and Bernstein's frustration: They know something, but lack the
smoking gun. They're willing to dig for that proof. Unlike Ben Bradlee, their editors take any
morsel of information that whiffs of that smoke, and run with it, truth and consequences be
damned.
Paul Geary is a contributing editor for The New Editor.
Paul Geary
David Rogers