Promoting American interests, while promoting your own. Can't help wondering what level of exposure it'll take to force the Times to finally cut the cord and let Judith Miller drop. Can't imagine why any other reputable journalistic outfit would want to hire her when and if that happens. But don't cry for Judy: I'm sure she'll be able to turn a tidy little dime selling herself to the monied, anti-Muslim winger fringe. After all, she's already got some experience in that line. Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, here's a look at Miller giving her career a boost in April 2003, on the roster of experts flacked by Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum—motto, "Promoting American Interests." (Judy's specialties: "Militant Islam, Biological warfare.") This is waybacked because she's not there now, though she'd spent the better part of a year on the list when this snapshot was taken. What are the odds that Judy still has Pipes on her speed dial?


posted by michael  1:06:22 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Rummy's Rules for the NYT. Dan Okrent's column today implies—without specific reporting or genuine critical assessment—a systematic perversion of the Times' long-standing, institutional structures of self-critique and self-correction in the runup to the Iraq war. An unnamed reporter (who we can feel pretty confident is Judith Miller) protected WMD sources "not just from exposure but from unfriendly reporting by colleagues." "A dysfunctional system" had somehow sprung up, one that "enabled some reporters operating out of Washington and Baghdad to work outside the lines of customary bureau management."

Remind you of anything?

John Pike, an intelligence expert and director of GlobalSecurity.org,  ... describes the Office of Special Plans as "Rummy's war room." Other critics are convinced the operation was manipulating information, and worse, disturbing the peer-review method within the intelligence community. "There's a formal, well-established intelligence process in Washington, which Rumsfeld apparently wanted to circumvent" by creating the office ...

Eric Boehlert, July 16, 2003, "Rumsfeld's personal spy ring"

The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as "stovepiping"—without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. ... Kenneth Pollack ... told me that what the Bush people did was "dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership."

Seymour Hersh, Oct. 27, 2003, "The Stovepipe"

Looks like Rummy's rules (in this case, the rule of the bureaucratic end-around) are just as useful within a newspaper as they are within the Pentagon. Bill Keller, meet Doug Feith and Stephen Cambone.

Okrent ends his column with a pious Times-longa-vita-breva flourish:

The aggressive journalism that I long for, and that the paper owes both its readers and its own self-respect, would reveal not just the tactics of those who promoted the W.M.D. stories, but how The Times itself was used to further their cunning campaign.

In 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz wrote that The Times had missed the real story of the Bolshevik Revolution because its writers and editors "were nervously excited by exciting events." That could have been said about The Times and the war in Iraq. The excitement's over; now the work begins.

Actually, the work has been going on for a while. And you'll pardon my skepticism that any of it—anything that cuts to the bone—is going to be advanced by the Times: whose current executive editor was managing editor during the period of the Judith Miller ascendancy and who oversaw that "dysfunctional system." (And who continues to express unreserved admiration for Miller.) Fortunately, it looks like Michael Massing is still on the case. Here's Tim Rutten in the left-coast Times:

Next week's edition of New York magazine will contain a critical profile of Miller, while a piece on Chalabi in the New Yorker — according to sources there — will touch on the Iraqi's relationship with the Times, which at one point employed his daughter. Meanwhile, the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books will contain another appraisal of the Times' coverage by Michael Massing, former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, who has been the most formidable of the Times' critics in this affair.

Astutely, Rutten follows by saying that "viewed in this context, the Times' explanation looks like a leaky lifeboat launched in the teeth of a gathering storm."

posted by michael  12:52:35 PM  
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The word from Pastor Dan. Daniel Okrent's rhetorical stance is always, "We journalists." His job, as he seems to take it, is to offer the (perversely uncomprehending) masses a glimpse into the mysteries of the trade. Okrent writes as if the "public" part of public editor were a suggestion of taint: as if his chief concern was to make sure that nobody in the fraternity could mistake him for one of those hairy, gap-toothed outsiders.

Today, Okrent unveils the "complex special project" his absence-of-a-column column hinted at last week: a report (the inanely, and inconsequentially, titled "Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?") on what pretty much everyone whose paycheck isn't signed by Arthur Sulzberger thinks is the Times' worst systematic fuckup ever, its pre-war WMD reporting. [You'll look in vain, by the way, for the "public editor" to assess the nature of the Times' public authority, and the damage sustained to that authority by the paper's massive failure of responsibility in the runup to war. If I were a public editor, that's probably where I'd start my approach to this issue. Okrent, of course, has already dismissed the idea that the Times has any special authority in American life, and thus any unusual responsibility to its readers or to the record.] And though there is, in fact, real substance behind today's column, Okrent obstinately refuses to write to it. Reviewing the story of a systematic failure—of a paper whose journalistic process was biased toward promoting a war, and suppressing arguments against it—Okrent cannot or will not reckon systematically with it. Instead he produces a disjunct sequence of preening, clubby little homilies, like this one on "hit-and-run journalism" (i.e., the failure to provide follow-up to stories with extraordinary claims):

Stories, like plants, die if they are not tended. So do the reputations of newspapers.

Really, that's sweet. It may have given Dan a warm feeling writing that: but if there are motives, and patterns, in the failure to follow up sensational WMD stories, you won't hear it here. Okrent's basic position, like that of Wednesday's Editor's Note, is that the Times failed to live up to its own best standards: sermonettes about those standards seem the appropriate response. Why the Times' lapse from its best self should have happened in this instance, and should have worked so rigorously in a single direction, remains a bit of a mystery—but not an urgent one, by any means. Something in the water, maybe.

So where in Okrent's piece is the beef? He in fact alleges what looks like serious internal misconduct tending towards open reportorial and editorial bias—though without being so impolite as to call attention to it as misconduct.

The contract between a reporter and an unnamed source - the offer of information in return for anonymity - is properly a binding one. But I believe that a source who turns out to have lied has breached that contract, and can fairly be exposed. The victims of the lie are the paper's readers, and the contract with them supersedes all others. (See Chalabi, Ahmad, et al.) Beyond that, when the cultivation of a source leads to what amounts to a free pass for the source, truth takes the fall. A reporter who protects a source not just from exposure but from unfriendly reporting by colleagues is severely compromised. Reporters must be willing to help reveal a source's misdeeds; information does not earn immunity.

In the midst of all that moralistic phrase-turning ("truth takes the fall," indeed!) is a nugget of actual information. Who Judith Miller, one wonders, could that rogue reporter have been, and how is it that he/she was allowed to determine what other reporters could and couldn't write? (For that matter, if this is true how does he/she still have a job? Doesn't such behavior count as something a bit more than simply being overprotective of a source?)

Then, a couple of grafs later, in the last of the day's sermonettes, another nugget:

My own reporting (I have spoken to nearly two dozen current and former Times staff members whose work touched on W.M.D. coverage) has convinced me that a dysfunctional system enabled some reporters operating out of Washington and Baghdad to work outside the lines of customary bureau management.

In some instances, reporters who raised substantive questions about certain stories were not heeded. Worse, some with substantial knowledge of the subject at hand seem not to have been given the chance to express reservations. It is axiomatic in newsrooms that any given reporter's story, tacked up on a dartboard, can be pierced by challenges from any number of colleagues. But a commitment to scrutiny is a cardinal virtue. When a particular story is consciously shielded from such challenges, it suggests that it contains something that plausibly should be challenged.

For an instant it seems like Okrent is about to go off the reservation. But no, nothing specific about that "dysfunctional system," much less about how it was created and maintained, is forthcoming. Look at the passives in that second graf: reporters who raised questions "were not heeded," "some" who had knowledge "seem not to have been given the chance" to offer criticisms. No names, either, God forbid. Could the Editor's Note have been any more oblique? By the end of the paragraph we're safely back in the homiletic realm of "commitments" and "cardinal virtues."

It's nice that Dan took the trouble to have all those conversations with his colleagues. Shows real diligence. And while he may be too high-minded for this, Dan, here's a clue from a common reader: gathering information you don't publish isn't reporting, it's hoarding.

posted by michael  11:15:14 AM  
tell me about it []