Anybody remember the Times' Editors Note of last May, its very own critique of the paper's lapses in covering the WMD story (better, its consistent, uncritical retailing of the Bush administration's WMD fantasies) in the runup to the Iraq invasion? Those were the days, huh? The note concluded (having nowhere specifically mentioned she who must not be named) with a pious flourish: it offered as to how the Times considered "the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation" about those weapons that it helped promote, as "unfinished business," and promised that the editors "fully intend[ed] to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight." So, yeah, how's that been going lately?

By now you've probably seen the detailed takeouts of David Sanger's foolish, haphazard, intellectually dishonest Monday article on another recently leaked British prewar memo, an article in which Sanger perversely builds a single clause (of a document written prior to the Downing Street Memo, not that Sanger makes that clear) into a refutation of the DSM-supported claim that the administration had secretly committed to war in Iraq long before it engaged in what amounted to a sham political process to determine on war. If you haven't, then Nico at ThinkProgress, eRobin at Fact-esque, and Riggsveda at Corrente will clue you in on the contortionate misreading (and selective quotation) required to allow Sanger to come up with his line: more from me would be superfluous.

The point here is that David Sanger is a known quantity. He's been one of the Times' more consistent, not to say committed, purveyors of pro-war trash for quite some time now. Last March, for instance, (when, alas, I was better than the half-assed blogger I've since become) I noted Sanger repeatedly promoting the administration line—in the face of his own reporting, strangely enough—that the Spanish vote rejecting Jose Maria Aznar was a capitulation to Al Qaeda in the wake of the Madrid bombing. He also took a (rather futile) turn assisting the GOP high command in smearing Richard Clarke. So when the Times editors assign a cynical suck-up to power like Sanger to write a lead article taking essentially the paper's first real, belated notice of the Downing Street Memo controversy—well, they know exactly what they're going to get.

It might seem that this is another instance of the Times flagrantly demonstrating allegiance to the Bushian Overlords—and while that may be part of the deal, I think the real energy behind the Sanger article comes from elsewhere. Last year, reviewing the Times' WMD Editor's Note, I suggested that it served to give merely "an appearance of self-critique while cleaving to some deep principle of corporate omerta." I'd say we're in similar territory here: that the real context, though Sanger's piece of course doesn't mention it, is the demand from the antiwar Left that the mainstream press notice the Downing Street Memo, and (perhaps) notice and account for its dereliction of duty in failing for so long to report on it. Putting Sanger on the case is the Times' calculated way of giving a big fuck-you to its critics on the Left. "You wanted us to write about this, you pissants? Well, be careful what you wish for."

By way of contrast, think of what it meant when the Washington Post gave front-page (Sunday) placement in late May to an article on the Downing Street Memo by Walter Pincus—whose incisive, critical pre-war reporting on the WMD claims had so often been shoved into the paper's back pages. (Not to mention that it was Pincus on Sunday who broke the second memo, the one David Sanger so diligently misread a day later.) However implicit, there's an actual apology in the gesture, some measure at least of humility—as opposed to the phony apology of the Editor's Note, which now appears as nothing so much as a line drawn in the sand. "This is where criticism stops," says the Times: "ask us to go further and you'll get a stick in the eye." Put the Sanger article (as gesture) alongside the intellectual capitulation represented by the paper's so-called Credibility Group report, which I wrote about last month. One gets the impression, at the institutional level, that the paper has been by this point thoroughly Hitchens-ized, or maybe Jarvis-ized. Just how poisonously resentful, how reactionary, has the editorial culture of the Times become? And how much worse is it going to get?

posted by michael  1:43:39 PM  
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