The nominations are in, and in the category of
worst correspondent working for a major newspaper, the anti-Pulitzer
goes to Judith Miller of The New York Times.
From The New York Review of Books to New York magazine,
Ms. Miller has gotten ripped for her role as
the War Witch who sold America on the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
Her own newspaper has dumped on her and, in the
process, dumped on some of its other reporters and their supervisors.
In a strange and contorted résumé
of The Times’ less-than-distinguished coverage of the war and the events
leading up thereto,
the paper’s editors wrote, "We have found a number
of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been."
In the course of their mea culpa, the authors
directed the readers to a Web site displaying a list of what they deemed
the worst
samples of their journalistic debacle. Ms. Miller’s
byline is on a number of them.
How could the most prestigious newspaper in the
United States—the paper read by much of the ruling class, if you will forgive
the use of that odious but not undescriptive
term, the paper from which most of the rest of big-time commercial mass
media takes
its cue—how could it, overbrimming with Harvard
graduates yet also fashionably diverse in its staff, how could it have
been "taken in"?
Was it just Ms. Miller who caused her newspaper
to suffer what may be a longer embarrassment than the Jayson Blair affair?
Not very likely. A lot of other people were in
on this one, as Daniel Okrent, The Times’ public editor, indicated in a
signed piece
appearing four days after the big mea culpa.
"Some of The Times’s coverage in the months leading up to the invasion
of Iraq was
credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized
by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines …. The Times’s
flawed journalism continued in the weeks after
the war began, when writers might have broken free from the cloaked government
sources who had insinuated themselves and their
agendas into the prewar coverage. I use ‘journalism’ rather than ‘reporting’
because
reporters do not put stories into the newspaper.
Editors make assignments, accept articles for publication, pass them through
various
editing hands, place them on a schedule, determine
where they will appear …. The failure was not individual, but institutional."
Mr. Okrent is right if you buy his premise, which
is that the paper did not adhere to its own standards. It had, he wrote,
"too great
a hunger for scoops," it had a "front-page syndrome,"
meaning an overweening desire for smackeroo stories, did "hit-and-run journalism,"
defined as covering something once and then leaving
the readers hanging without reporting subsequent developments, and finally,
he said,
the paper indulged in "coddling sources" by printing
weak stories the sources wanted in the paper.
If you accept Mr. Okrent’s implicit definition
of what a newspaper, particularly The Times, is, then you cannot argue
with his judgments,
and he is partially right. A newspaper is supposed
to be this incorruptible organization of fierce social, economic and political
independent
neutrality which practices a disinterested professionalism.
That is what the news industry holds itself out to be, it’s how it advertises
itself and,
at least as importantly, it’s what its reporters
and editors take it to be. But it isn’t. At least, that’s not all it is.
Newspapers, least of all The New York Times, are
not published from a space platform outside the gravitational pull of the
society in which
they exist. They are part of intricate social,
political and economic processes which are seldom studied or recognized.
Although journalism likes
to think of itself as outside the systems it
reports on, it is not. It is part and parcel of these systems, interacting
with them in countless ways.
The newspapers and the journalists who work for
them claim for themselves a kind of neutrality which confers on them special
status and
immunities, but the claim is based on a set of
myths which bring commercial benefits to the news organizations and social
and morale
benefits to others. Thus, however feeble the
record, it is a boost to social morale to believe that newspapers are fearless
crusaders,
exposing the wicked and bringing justice to the
downtrodden. Every so often, one of them will actually behave that way,
but day to day,
that is not the primary or even the secondary
work of these organizations.
Anyone picking up a copy of The New York Times
can see what its daily work consists of, but it also has other functions
not visible to
the naked eye. It is, among other things, the
bulletin board where the nation’s ruling elites post a variety of announcements
they want
other members of the other elites to know about.
Incumbent administrations in Washington have used The Times for that purpose
for
many decades, and it doesn’t take an astute reader
to figure out which items in the paper are news stories and which are plants—that
is,
\announcements of one sort or another disguised
as news events. So The Times, more than any other publication, is the Osservatore
Romano of the government and of the most powerful
groups in the society, the semi-official voice of the United States. Hence,
its
Op-Ed pages are festooned with dull, ghostwritten
articles by important figures saying dull, repetitious things.
These dull articles reveal another Times function,
that of reinforcing and propagating what the TV yappers call "conventional
wisdom,"
or the reigning set of opinions held by most
of the ruling class or classes—that is to say, the big-money, big-job,
high-prestige people.
The processes by which an opinion becomes conventional
is not well described in any place that I know of, but the processes obviously
exist, and obviously The New York Times is a
place where you can read them—or, if a member of one of the ruling elites,
where you
get your clues and cues as to what to think.
Whether The Times is a social organization which
sometimes seems to help form conventional opinion or sometimes merely disseminates
it,
it is an important element in forging the beliefs
of the powerful, but it is only one element. The departments, institutes
and professors of
certain universities, the think tanks, the international
meetings such as the annual get-together at Davos, Switzerland, the informal
transactions on golf courses and yachts and who
knows what else, help crunch the raw data of life and refine it into powerful
prevailing opinion.
The Times’ uppermost people, executives and featured
writers are part of the governing elite and, as members of this social
commonality,
absorb the same viewpoints, the same truths,
the same conventional wisdoms as the others in their class. Hence, it was
not surprising that
many on The Times would be receptive to Ms. Miller’s
tales of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. At some point, this had become
conventional wisdom.
It did not have to work out this way, and wouldn’t
have if a significant number of people at The Times were of an independent
cast of mind,
but the odds are against that. The Times is your
clubbable institution par excellence. Generally, it does not recruit independent,
marginal
types—and when it does, it regurgitates them.
Vide Molly Ivins’ unhappy stay at the newspaper.
People afflicted with conventional wisdom are
prone to use clichés, such as "thinking outside the box" and "pushing
the envelope"—terms
which suggest that deviation from the ruling-class
norms are painful and rare. It does happen, however, as Michael Massing,
writing in
The New York Review of Books, pointed out in
discussing the press handling of the W.M.D. question and specifically the
aluminum tubes
which, it was said, Saddam was using to build
his nonexistent atom bomb. The tubes, Mr. Massing wrote, "were drawing
the notice of Knight
Ridder’s Washington bureau, which serves Knight
Ridder’s thirty-one newspapers in the US, including The Philadelphia Inquirer,
The Miami
Herald, and The Detroit Free Press. …. As Washington
bureau chief John Walcott recalled, in the late summer of 2002, ‘we began
hearing
from sources in the military, the intelligence
community, and the foreign service of doubts about the arguments the administration
was making.’"
As Mr. Walcott’s actions show, sociology is not
necessarily destiny, but, given The Times’ place in the order of things,
that it would break
out of its elite group-think was a long shot.
For those of us who are not thus situated, the whole episode shows how
foolish it is to let
The Times be our bible. The discussion is not
closed when somebody says, "Well, I read it in The Times." No matter how
useful or
entertaining, plunking down a buck and buying
a paper is no substitute for using your noggin.