The Times and Iraq

May 26, 2004 2:29 AM

Finallythe NYT offers up an analysis of its pre-war coverage. "But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge."
posted by raaka (35 comments total)

ugh, as a former journalism student, there are few things that annoy me more than papers analyzing how badly they covered things. It's worse than an administration spinning the news.

Well, even though it was plainly obvious that we should have gone after the facts on the case for war. well shucks, we just somehow forgot what our jobs were. Won't happen again, honest.

sad
posted by efalk at 3:01 AM on May 26, 2004

i'm tired, pay no attention to that comment
posted by efalk at 3:03 AM on May 26, 2004

So what's their excuse for being pansy-asses during post-war coverage?

Stay tuned and find out!
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 3:09 AM on May 26, 2004

Well this should satisfy Instapundit and all of those other conservative bloggers who constantly demand that the NYT be more forthcoming with their corrections.
posted by alidarbac at 3:35 AM on May 26, 2004

Awesome. I love an open newspaper. Full disclosure makes better governments, and it makes better news media, too.

I have a fantasy vision of what a newspaper (or any media outlet) should be, and maybe this is a step in that direction. To come (in my dreams): a bibliography of sources at the end of each article ("Tom Smith, Dir. of Operations, SomeCo., three interviews, on these dates, at these locations" "_A Book About This Subject_ by XY Author, 1992, Publishing Co." "27 people called for confirmation did not return our calls" etc.); an obligation to print more reader letters or offer more forums for reader discussion amongst the readers, even it means publishing monthly or quarterly supplements containing *all* letters which are not patently from cranks (although that would be a fun supplement in itself); full audio and/or video of interviews (where permitted by the subjects, of course); an automatic article-coding which has symbols which indicate "this article is based upon sources which refuse to be permitted to be named in print" at the byline or headline position; reproductions of the writer's notes, either transcribed or in the original; full online versions of stories which are cut for space reasons when published on paper; full citing of photographs: exact GPS location, geopolitical location, local place name, the names of every person which can be given in the photograph, date, time of day, compass direction, reasons the photo was chosen (this would be great in the RDF info the Times has started using); public email addresses for all reporters (with an obligation to at least send an automated response); company-sponsored weblogs in the vein of the BBC World Service program "From Our Own Correspondent" in which the journalists talk about doing the work and the sensations and non-news experiences which color his/her work; financial and conflict of interest disclosures publicly on file for all employees, bylined or not; public, annual meetings at which management can be quizzed by the public, similar to what happens at shareholder meetings; and the same kinds of meetings for the employee unions, who bear more than a little responsbility for covering for and coddling lazy and stupid journalists; and more. These are just the high points of my plan for New New Media.

Estimated date for these changes: Soon, accompanied by an army of snowmen marching on Hell.
posted by Mo Nickels at 4:11 AM on May 26, 2004

The admission that they joyfully played right into the hands of spurious informants and a lying administration is welcome, but it won't really matter. Right here in MeFi, since the war debates started, I have seen every argument put forth by our conservative warmongering friends crumbling under the weight of facts, but to no avail. No admission to being wrong, no change of heart, no humility. And the resisting Iraqis are still being called terrorists. Hell...
posted by acrobat at 4:22 AM on May 26, 2004

ugh, as a former journalism student, there are few things that annoy me more than papers analyzing how badly they covered things. It's worse than an administration spinning the news.

Umm... isn't this exactly what the job of the ombudsman is for?
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 5:13 AM on May 26, 2004

I appreciate the Times' desire to avoid lynching one of its own reporters, but not to mention the role of the Judith Miller, a great reporter who went off the rails, is puzzling.

In an email to a colleague, John Burns in Baghdad, she scolded him for poaching on her territory by assigning a Chalabi story to someone else:

"I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years, and have done most of the stories about him for our paper, including the long takeout we recently did on him. He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper."





posted by CunningLinguist at 5:20 AM on May 26, 2004

They're not apologising, they're just complicitly spinning the new Whitehouse line:

"It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq, but in this case it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in."

Yeah, that's it, nobody wanted to invade Iraq, it was that dastardly Chalabi, pulling the wool over everyone's eyes.

Meet the new New York Times, same as the old New York Times.
posted by Blue Stone at 5:46 AM on May 26, 2004

Yeah, that's it, nobody wanted to invade Iraq, it was that dastardly Chalabi, pulling the wool over everyone's eyes.

I for one believe the entire WMD innacuracy was the fault of six soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison. Their commanders were simply blindsided!
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 6:21 AM on May 26, 2004

Slate's Jack Shafer has been gunning for Miller for a very long time now, it's almost an obsession. But she's extremely defensive—she won't admit her mistakes. This is too little, too late from the Times, I think.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 7:35 AM on May 26, 2004

I think it's a step in the right direction. Newspapers, if they are interested in trying to tell the truth, should wear their corrections on their sleeves, because they they realize their errors and admit them is proof that they might still believe in their own mission statement. You can measure the quality of a news source by how prominently it features its corrections.
posted by Hildago at 9:06 AM on May 26, 2004

When exactly did Judith Miller "go off the rails"? She's been a stovepipe for dodgy warmongerering intel for years. The fact that the NYT gave her nebulous channelling of CHalabi's lies so much uncritical coverage and even now refuses to disown her shows two things: the first is that I now regard the NYT is a much less reliable rag, and the second is that Judith Miller has many friends in high places to smooth things over for her.

Miller played a highly unusual role in an Army unit assigned to search for dangerous Iraqi weapons, according to U.S. military officials, prompting criticism that the unit was turned into what one official called a 'rogue operation.' More than a half-dozen military officers said that Miller acted as a middleman between the Army unit with which she was embedded and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, on one occasion accompanying Army officers to Chalabi's headquarters, where they took custody of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law. She also sat in on the initial debriefing of the son-in-law, these sources say. Since interrogating Iraqis was not the mission of the unit, these officials said, it became a 'Judith Miller team'.

posted by meehawl at 9:10 AM on May 26, 2004

Give the Times credit for focusing attention on their own mistakes, even if they decline to offer critics Miller's head on a pike.

The NY Times ain't nearly perfect, but it's one of the best things in media.
posted by sacre_bleu at 9:14 AM on May 26, 2004

The NY Times ain't nearly perfect, but it's one of the best things in media.

I thought that was the Guardian/Observer, as long as we're talking English-language newspapers. Le Monde has had some of the best Iraqi coverage, while Der Spiegel is in a class of its own. You simply cannot understand the complexities of European politics without at least skimming both of these. La Repubblica offers valuable insights into the dynamics of a country with a less-anti-Bush government than most European States while El Pais offers a likewise illuminating perspective from another frontline Mediterranean society dealing with ongoing Islamist terrorism within its borders and that shares porous borders and proximity to several failed or failing Islamic States. Spains's recent decision to pursue the "War on Terror" from a law enforcement rather than a military perspective seemed to baffle most US observers but was easily anticipated from and long-telegraphed within the pages of El Pais.

In this case of Miller sopecifically I do think there were also issues of ego and finance at play:

While Miller, either under her own single by-line or with NYT colleagues, was touting the bioterror threat, her book Germs, co-authored with Times-men Steven Engelberg and William Broad was in the bookstores and climbing the best seller lists. The same day that Miller opened an envelope of white powder (which turned out to be harmless) at her desk at the New York Times, her book was #6 on the New York Times best seller list. The following week (October 21, 2001), it reached #2. By October 28, --at the height of her scare-mongering campaign--it was up to #1.

posted by meehawl at 9:46 AM on May 26, 2004

Fuck your sources, and your sources fuck you.
posted by riviera at 9:54 AM on May 26, 2004

Fire Judith Miller and Elizabeth Bumiller and Wilgoren for a start.
posted by nofundy at 10:02 AM on May 26, 2004

Don't see how it helps the Times to become an even-more-perfectly-conformed amplifier of liberal group-think. The Times would be better off to cultivate a moderate/apolitical news approach, like the Wall Street Journal (not speaking of Op-Ed, where the WSJ's not moderate or apolitical) or USA Today.

The creation of a complete alternative channel to moderate and conservative people is the great triumph of the last few years of the media industry. From the low end (Limbaugh, American Family Radio) to the middlebrow (FoxNews) to the high end (OpinionJournal, National Review Online, Weekly Standard), there's a thriving traditional-conservative alternative at every point in the market, and liberal media will just be ignored if they won't be relevant.
posted by MattD at 10:59 AM on May 26, 2004

MattD - I hate to tell you - the Grey Lady's shit does indeed stink, but not of "liberal".

For example, it took them several YEARS to acknowledge the Florida 2000 election voter disenfranchisement story covered in depth by Greg Palast.

They did so in an unattributed editorial, 2 1/2 or 3 years after the fact. It was a nice tombstone on the grave of that little scandal. Oh well, it's only democracy, right?

Lately, the NYT has lapsed back into denial about the whole story.

Liberal ? Like Pravda, maybe.

MattD, your conservative media industry is a triumph of something, yes, but not of truth. Quite the opposite :



From This October 2, 2003 PIPA report [315KB PDF]

"The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) carries out research on public opinion on foreign policy and international issues by conducting nationwide polls, focus groups and comprehensive reviews of polling conducted by other organizations.



PIPA is a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) and the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland."

And - for the record - I'm skeptical of Public Radio as well, but a 23% percent propaganda quotient ain't bad (as long as it's leavened with other more reliably truthful media fare).
posted by troutfishing at 11:17 AM on May 26, 2004

Troutfishing -- you and I are in agreement that the Times is not perfectly liberal. In fact, I'm not convinced that it is really liberal, by intention, at all. It's more a slavish follower of the establishment, which, from the vantage point of West 43rd Street, consists more or less exclusively of Democratic politicans and well-heeled Democratic-leaning finance and culture industry players.

Where this establishment is of one mind -- say, on abortion, multiculturalism, affirmative action, school choice -- than the Times takes second to no one in its militance and obvious story-skewing.

However, when enough Democratic politicians get minds of their own (or get scared, as is more likely the case), the Times gets all tenuous. When Gore and his folks decided to take their medicine in December 2000, the Times fell into line. Similarly, when Kerry and a lot of other Democrats voted with the President in 2002 on the Iraq War, and conspicuously avoided the big anti-war protests in early 2003, the Times couldn't figure out who to parrot.

I have noted the same stats regarding the preponderance of misperceptions in the audience for some conservative media -- it worries me too. The solution, I think, would be for media more capable of educating its audience to step away from the left-wing ideology which turns off the moderate and conservative audience. At the high end, this already works: the U.S. readership of the Wall Street Journal is probably two thirds Republican, and the Financial Times probably three-fourths, and I seriously doubt that you'd find WSJ or FT readers on the wrong side of that pool of misperception.
posted by MattD at 11:40 AM on May 26, 2004

Personally, I'd find it a supreme irony if it was revealed that the NYT, the neocons, and Judith Miller were all in fact doing the bidding of Tehran through Chalabi.

"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi." Larry Johnson, a former senior counter-terrorist official at the state department, said: "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy." ... An intelligence source in Washington said the FBI investigation into the affair would begin with Mr Chalabi's "handlers" in the Pentagon, who include William Luti, the former head of the office of special plans, and his immediate superior, Douglas Feith.

posted by meehawl at 12:29 PM on May 26, 2004

judith miller sucks - she is still trying to make excuses for her lame reporting. she should have been axed months ago.
posted by specialk420 at 12:51 PM on May 26, 2004

So, The New York Times, thru Miller's mistakes, led the chorus for a war against a country that never attacked the US. And that makes them liberal how?
posted by haqspan at 2:33 PM on May 26, 2004

So predictable...when the tide begins to turn, the craven crabs rotate to face the other way....
posted by rushmc at 3:58 PM on May 26, 2004

This massive retraction by the NYT is a real milestone in America's realization that we went to war under false pretenses.
posted by Nelson at 4:19 PM on May 26, 2004

MattD... "USAToday"?

pppsssstttt.. someone please politely tell MattD about Jack Kelley. of course, nobody cared. after all, he's a white right-winger who wrote maliciously fake anti-Muslim bullshit for USA Today, not a black cokehead/drunk simply reporting from his living room for the "liberal" New York Times because he couldn't get his dealer to travel with him on assignement.

but the rightwing crucified Jayson Blair, to hit his hated-by-the-fundies boss. not a peep about Kelley's much more appalling scandal

*eagerly waits for MattD to explain how RNC cheerleader Bumiller is actually a liberal Democrat Bush-hater like her NYT colleagues*


liberal media will just be ignored if they won't be relevant.

ah, "relevant", the right-winger's favorite new word for the 2003-2004 season (UN = "irrelevant", Chalabi = "relevant"...).
well, trout has a point: what about those nice right-wing media that misled the American public into thinking (on zero hard evidence) that Saddam did 9-11? the aluminum tubes? mobile wmd labs? what about the "relevant" neocon magazines that cheered from the sidelines and egged the neocons in power on to attaq?
"relevant" media indeed.
relevant crap. enjoy the flavor.

like the Wall Street Journal (not speaking of Op-Ed, where the WSJ's not moderate or apolitical)

sorry to break the news, but the editorial page is what the paper's publishers think.
it puts then, by definition, everything the WSJ writes, even in the non-editorial pages, under a suspicious light. the WSJ is currently owned by cheerful right-wingers who love sweatshops, various unsavory US temporary allies/employees/poodles (like Karimov, for example -- 2010's Saddam or Osama? -- talk about disgruntled employees) and despise the EU, not to mention the foreigners who have the gall not to appreciate possible future employment in some slave-labor khaki-pant factory.

also, please, the "left-wingers" are out of touch with America is kind of dishonest. at least until November. right now, the Right is a very vocal, exceedingly powerful minority in the US who lost the last three presidential popular votes and two (?) out of the most recent three presidential elections.
it's still a minority. just that. deal with it. maybe Ashcrfot will manage to scare enough people into changing their minds and vote for the tough-talking bunch. or Diebold will deliver.
so, until November, please lose the "out-of-touch left" sermon.

The Times would be better off to cultivate a moderate/apolitical news approach,

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
posted by matteo at 7:43 PM on May 26, 2004

Wow. That was good.
posted by troutfishing at 9:15 PM on May 26, 2004

sorry to break the news, but the editorial page is what the paper's publishers think.

This is dubious. I can't imagine there's an editorial page editor in the country who doesn't regularly run op-eds with which he wholeheartedly disagrees.

However, even if it were true, what are you saying? Publisher's aren't allowed to have opinions? Or they're only allowed to share your opinions? It's impossible for someone whose politics differ from yours to produce quality balanced reporting?
posted by IshmaelGraves at 10:16 PM on May 26, 2004

s/Publisher's/Publishers/

dammit.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 10:17 PM on May 26, 2004

newshour nailed miller to the wall tonight - poor sock puppet
posted by specialk420 at 10:38 PM on May 26, 2004

Editor and Publisher magazine :

" NEW YORK Many newspapers that have carried some or all of The New York Times' stories on Iraq that were cited for flaws in a critical editor's note Wednesday are scrambling to explain the paper's mea culpa to readers.

Since more than 300 newspapers nationwide subscribe to The New York Times News Service, the paper's revelation that at least six stories on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were problematic is being felt across the country."

I'm growing very, very fond of Editor and Publisher.
posted by troutfishing at 10:16 AM on May 27, 2004

Also from E & P :

"N.Y. Times' Memo to Staff on WMD Note

NEW YORK In a memo to New York Times staffers, Executive Editor Bill Keller and Managing Editor Jill Abramson declare that today's editors' note critiquing the paper's coverage of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is "not an attempt to find a scapegoat or to blame reporters for not knowing then what we know now." It said the Times was hardly alone in its false statements, and predicted that the note "will not satisfy our most vociferous critics, but it is not written for them." - Ah, we just didn't know any better!
posted by troutfishing at 10:19 AM on May 27, 2004

The Grey Lady, under duress, vomits up a 1/2 truth.

Then eats it.
posted by troutfishing at 10:21 AM on May 27, 2004

Booted NYT Editor-in-Chief Howell Raines' comments/defense/sniping and, for you Kremlinologists, E&P's entertaining analysis of same.


Just to get the terminology right, the editorial page is where the unsigned opinions of the publisher's flunkies go, the op-ed page is opposite the editorial page, where columns that may or may not agree with those opinions go, and the news pages are supposed to be behind a Chinese wall.)
posted by CunningLinguist at 10:45 AM on May 27, 2004

Get Your Times On
posted by homunculus at 3:46 PM on May 27, 2004