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The Return of the
King
Come back Ahmad, all is forgiven. Via War and Piece: Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader accused of giving the Bush administration flawed information about Saddam Hussein's weapons program, will visit Washington in November amid speculation that U.S. officials view him as an acceptable candidate for Iraqi prime minister . . . So the guy who passed NSA intercepts to Tehran is an acceptable candidate, but the guy who laid a floral wreath on Khomeini's grave is too friendly with the Iranians. I shall retire to Bedlam. http://billmon.org/archives/002291.html ~~~ The New Pravda's Lost
Year
In his comments Sunday on what he called the "Miller Mess" -- I could think of a more pungent term for it -- New York Times omsbudsman Byron Calame points to a largely overlooked revelation in Bill Keller's mea culpa on the same subject, one that is even more disgraceful than the paper's willful blindness in the Plame case. In his message to New Pravda staffers last Wednesday, Keller explained why it took him over a year to publicly acknowledge what the reality-based community -- and Keller himself -- had known to be true for most of that time: that the paper had allowed Judy Miller and her sources to lead it down the primrose path to war: I wish we had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as I became executive editor. At the time, we thought we had compelling reasons for kicking the issue down the road. The paper had just been through a major trauma, the Jayson Blair episode, and needed to regain its equilibrium. It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors. I was trying to get my arms around a huge new job, appoint my team, get the paper fully back to normal, and I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction. In other words, thanks to office politics -- and Bill Keller's sense of
proper corporate etiquette -- America's "paper of record" essentially ignored
its own role in publicizing what was either (or both) the biggest foreign policy
con job since the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, or the worst intelligence debacle
since Pearl Harbor. Personally, I think this deserves a hell of a lot more than Calame's rather milktoast censure: The paper should have addressed the problems of the coverage sooner. It is the duty of the paper to be straight with its readers, and whatever the management reason was for not doing so, the readers didn't get a fair shake. Fair shake? For those of us who shook with rage as we watched the corporate media -- and the New Pravda in particular -- dance around their own role in hyping the WMD threat, even as casualties piled up in Iraq, that doesn't even begin to cover it. I wonder: What went through Bill Keller's mind when he heard about Bush's little comedy routine at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner -- the one where the commander in chief pretended to search under the couch for those "missing" weapons of mass destruction? Did Keller find that "unsavory"? Did it make him feel better about having "kicked the issue down the road"? This is not to say that the New York Times and Judy Miller were the sole reason America went to war -- the favorite straw horse of the New Pravda's many apologists. But it's unquestionable that Bill Keller's year of silence proved enormously helpful to the Cheney administration's frantic attempts to change the subject. For better or (mostly) worse, the Times sets the agenda for the rest of the corporate media pack. So its silence became the silence of the journalistic lambs. Would it have made any substantive difference if the Times had spoken out sooner, and debunked Miller's "reporting" as aggressively as it originally showcased it? Maybe not, but by the time the paper did speak up, in May 2004, the onset of the election campaign silly season had made it far easier for the White House to dismiss all questions about the WMD fiasco as partisan politics. The lost year also dovetailed quite nicely with Senate Whitewash Committee chairman Pat Roberts's strategy for containing the damage and steering the committee's investigation away from the cabal. In a sense, Keller and the New Pravda gave the cover up artists a year-long head start. That's an awfully high price for an editor to pay to avoid making his predecessor look bad (which itself is a rather cowardly excuse for inaction.) But it is of a piece with Keller's mysterious impotence when it came to the supervision of Judy Miller -- as when he confessed in the Times's magnum opus last Sunday that he tried to take Miller off the WMD beat, but she kept "drifting back" on her own. I mean, what was Keller supposed to do about that? He was just the Executive Editor. What Keller is admitting, of course, is that when it came to the WMD story -- and the care and feeding of Judy Miller -- he was powerless in the face of his publisher's passionate dedication to her and her mission. This, too, is touched upon only delicately in Calame's post mortem, which not only shies from the question of whether Pinch Sulzberger protected Miller from Keller, but avoids the even more fundamental question of whether the publisher helped Miller protect the cabal from the New York Times. In the end, it stretches credulity to think the New Pravda's lost year was completely a product of internal politics. Would the paper, as an institution, have shown such reticence if full disclosure would have helped the powers that be, rather than hurt them? I don't think so. Miller would have been discredited and dumped as fast as or faster than Dan Rather and the 60 Minutes II team that fell for the phony AWOL memos. In a way, though, this has been a useful scandal, if only because it has exposed the reality behind the New Pravda's self-defined role as the imperial "paper of record." It is fundamentally unhealthy for a single news organization -- particularly one so joined at the hip with the corporate and political elites -- to lead the rest of the "respectable" media around by the nose. If there is one thing both left and right can probably agree upon, it's that American journalism would benefit if more editors and reporters took the sage advice to "think for yourselves, schmucks," instead of letting the schmucks at the New York Times do their thinking for them. As for the Gray Lady, well, some are calling this the worse episode in her history since Walter Duranty curled up next to Stalin's propaganda machine. But I'm afraid we have to go a little further back in history to find the appropriate analogy. To me, the New Pravda's role in the Iraq debacle resembles the part played by William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal in the far more successful Spanish-American War. It was Hearst, after all, who cabled a Journal photographer in Cuba: "You supply the pictures; I'll supply the war." Which appears to have been roughly the same instructions the cabal gave Judy Miller. Both were true to their word. Which at this point, is a lot more than you can say for the New York Times. Posted by billmon at October 23, 2005 09:17 PM
Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/ Please let us stay on topic and be civil. OM
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