So here it is at last, the distinguished thing. On A10 today, the long-awaited Editor's Note discussing the Times' acceptance and promotion of WMD fantasies in the run-up to the Iraq war. Jack Shafer, who reported in Slate yesterday that the Note was coming down the pike ("Judy's Turn To Cry"), shouldn't have gotten his hopes up.

The glaring fact about the Times' nostra culpa, the key to the position as it were, is that Judith Miller is named nowhere in it. She's been unpersoned, the result of the delicate balancing act the Times has set itself, of offering an appearance of self-critique while cleaving to some deep principle of corporate omerta. Is there any question that the following is meant as a big fuck-you to Shafer, Michael Massing, and anybody else who's criticized Miller's reporting?

Some critics of our coverage during [the pre-war period] have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated.

Lovely word, complicated. Translation: you naive people who focus on "individual reporters," you just don't understand how a newspaper works. (An attitude the Editor's Note further exemplifies when it calls out an evasive, distorted letter, written by NYT military affairs correspondent Michael Gorden in reply to Massing's NYRB critique, as "a primer on the complexities" of intelligence reporting.) Here are the "complications" the Times thinks have eluded all of us outsiders:

Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

We were insufficiently skeptical: that represents the outer limit of culpability to which the Editor's Note will admit. And really, is it so difficult to see how the newspaperly virtues of competitiveness ("rushing scoops") and love of the juicy story ("dire claims") might have become vices in this instance? Add to these cultural factors the now-regrettable affiliation with Chalabi (which the Times is careful to stress it was not alone in), and you have the makings of a series of what the Note calls, in its finely measured voice, "problematic articles."

Writing in advance of the apearance of the Editor's Note, Jack Shafer wondered how it was going to break: whether it would "excoriate reporters only," in a black-and-white "they failed" maneuver, or would "rebuke Times editors, too," producing "a more nuanced critique." Well, there's nuance out the wazoo here. In fact—something I don't think Shafer would have expected—far from excoriating their reporters, essentially the editors are taking the fall for them (well, for her, basically—She Who Must Not Be Named). Why is that?

Look again at the Note's explanation of those "complications" we need to understand.

Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted.

Whose "strong desire" are we talking about? It's almost a Freudian slip: the antecedent of "their" is, of course, "Iraqi defectors"—but it's hard not to feel it gravitating toward the subject of the previous sentence, "editors." Which is exactly the point. The Times didn't just produce "problematic" reporting in the runup to war. It produced reporting systematically distorted by a desire that had hardened into a policy conclusion: Saddam Hussein had to go, and a war had to be fought to oust him.

The Times won't talk about editorial bias. You don't get to be managing editor of the NYT by being a fool, and Bill Keller's no fool. He knows how this thing looks out in the world. His paper (with Howell Raines at the helm throughout the period) allowed its coverage of the crucial, the overriding rationale for war to be hijacked by a reporter with an ideological agenda, one who had extensive, long-standing social and business ties to Chalabi and to the neocon establishment promoting the war. (I'll post a fun little Judy Miller dossier in a bit, but a good start is Daniel Forbes' article about Miller's ties to the wingnut Middle East Forum.) The paper wasn't simply taken in by a con man and by its own pardonable wish to be out in front of a major story—"disingenuous" is a kind word for what the Editor's Note is doing arguing that position. Repeatedly, as Michael Massing has demonstrated, the Times turned its front page over to a writer who had committed herself to advancing the cause of her friends and ideological fellow travelers, and who as a consequence completely and unfairly dismissed any criticisms or counterevidence offered by their bureaucratic opponents (or by independent sources). Simply put, on the WMD issue the Times failed to act as an honest broker of information. It had every opportunity in the world to know it, and to avoid putting itself in that position: and it refused. The reasons are opaque, but the suspicion inevitably arises that the editors deliberately used the news columns of the Times to promote a favored policy, and thus bear a heavy burden of responsibility for manipulating public opinion toward support for an unjustified war.

The editors aren't covering for Miller out of love. A proper, rigorous accounting of what the Times did with its WMD reporting is impossible without a rigorous accounting of Miller, her ideology, her allegiances, her intellectual honesty or lack of it. The Times doesn't want that rigorous accounting, because it doesn't want to critique or even consider the use and abuse of its editorial power. Today's Editor's Note isn't self-criticism: it's a tactical feint. Don't fall for it.

posted by michael  2:52:48 PM  
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