We're journalists. It's not our job to remember things. As Eric Umansky notes, writing in Slate's "Today's Papers" column (suddenly it's Slate day here at Reading A1), Thom Shanker's A1 lead ("Hussein's Agents Are Behind Attacks in Iraq, Pentagon Finds") is so hedged with "we don't really know if any of this is true"-type caveats that the report practically disappears from the page as you read it:

The NYT says the Pentagon report that Saddam's henchmen are behind some bombings is apparently based on interrogations and other specific intelligence. The story, which is datelined Washington, acknowledges that the paper didn't actually see the report and is relying on descriptions and quotes from "United States government officials and military officers." In other judicious tush-covering language, the NYT says, "It is not known whether [the report] represents a fully formed consensus or whether there might be dissenting assessments. ... The report does not address the question of how broad-based support for the insurgency is."

Maybe I'm naive, but if I were a Times editor, I'd do a few skeptical double-takes on being presented with a story summarizing anonymous Administration officials summarizing a classified Pentagon study my reporter wasn't allowed to look at, the truth of whose conclusions there is absolutely no way independently to verify. A study which, by the way, is being used to headline the "issue" of Saddam's remnant secret service at a time when there happens to be a bloody mass revolt taking place in Iraq in front of everybody's eyes. (Assuming, that is, that the Times actually has a standard for relevance that it wants to adhere to.) And if I ran it, I sure as hell wouldn't devote splashy A1 real estate to it.

Is there nobody at the Times who remembers the paper getting its fingers burned back in February when it flogged the alleged Zarqawi letter? When we were all supposed to get jacked up over the news that Al Qaeda was about to start running the anti-American show in Iraq, thus proving the Administration's claim that this was the "central front" of the TerraWar? As in that instance, the appearance of this latest "secret" report seems to be entirely dictated by somebody's idea of the current PR imperatives: for the CPA/Pentagon, there's no such thing, in virtually an a priori sense, as popular uprising in Iraq. If we can't work the foreign-fighters line just now, well, we still have the Baathist-dead-enders to throw a few jabs at. (Which begs the question, just who do they think is the audience for this stuff? I'll make the prediction, and a pretty safe one it is, that these latest dramatic revelations will slip quietly from view in almost no time, just like their cousins before them.) Given how reliable Pentagon-produced (and Pentagon-hyped) intelligence has proven to date, wouldn't prudence at least, if not news judgement, dictate a more muted response from the Times?

Update (Friday, 4/30): Can't believe I missed pointing out the obvious yesterday—namely, that this stuff about Saddam's old henchmen being responsible for attacks on U.S. forces comes at a moment when re-Baathification is rapidly emerging as the order of the day (thanks to Juan Cole for the link). Which would probably make our no doubt Chalabi-oriented Pentagon leakers the real dead-enders in this scenario.

posted by michael  12:41:59 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Okrent, MIA. Quickly noted, a fine column by Slate's Jack Shafer, "The Right To Be Wrong: And the elephant in the New York Times newsroom." Shafer has continued to hold the paper's editorial feet to the fire over Judith Miller's grossly misguided reporting about Iraqi WMD programs in the runup to the war, and—more important, from the standpoint of the Times' moral authority—over the paper's unwillingness to set the record straight on Miller's lapses as a reporter and its editors' lapses in judgement and oversight.

As I've argued for almost a year now, Miller and the Times got taken by her sources on the subject of Iraq's WMD, a swindle the paper has never acknowledged with even a side glance. Yesterday (April 27), for example, the Times ran a piece about Ahmad Chalabi's fall from the Pentagon's good graces ("White House Favorite Is Becoming Its Headache") without giving any hint that it was Chalabi who, with Miller, stoked the Times with what turned out to be lies about Iraq's WMD capabilities. Tweak yesterday's piece a little and change a few names, and you could retitle it "New York Times Favorite Has Become Its Headache." ...

Rather than addressing the issue, the New York Times has ignored how Miller's sources used the paper to exaggerate Iraq's non-conventional weapons capabilities.

Read the whole piece, and ask yourself: Why does Jack Shafer have to go on prodding the Times' institutional conscience from the outside? Isn't that what a "public editor" is supposed to do?

posted by michael  10:40:26 AM  
tell me about it []